No Prejudice Here chronicles a heretofore untold story of civil rights in modern America. In embracing the Western urban experience, it relates the struggle for civil rights and school desegregation in Denver, Colorado. It chronicles early legislative and political trends to promote Denver as a racially tolerant city, which encouraged African-Americans to move to the urban center for opportunities unique to communities in the postwar American West while nonetheless trying to maintain segregation by limiting educational and employment opportunities for minorities. Dynamic historian Summer Cherland recounts this tension over six decades, with specific attention to the role of community control efforts, legislative and political strategies, and the importance of youth activism. Her insightful study provides an overview of the seminar 1974 Supreme Court case Keyes v. Denver Public Schools No. 1, and traces the community's reaction to court decisions until the city was released from federal oversight twenty years later. Cherland's book proves that civil rights activism, and the need for it, lasted well beyond the years that typically define the civil rights movement, and illustrates for our contemporary consideration the longstanding struggle in urban communities for justice and equality.

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain Within your hands is a glimpse into the life, mind, soul, and "truth" of cherished American icon, Mark Twain. This uncensored autobiography is not only a legacy he left behind, but also a gift to all.
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He grew up on the shores of the Mississippi River and took his pen name from the way Mississippi steamboat crews measured the river's depth (the cry "Mark twain " meant the river was at least 12 feet deep and safe to travel).
Twain wrote prolifically, publishing novels, travelogues, newspaper articles, short stories, and political pamphlets. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
On the surface, these novels are gripping adventure stories of boys running free on the Mississippi. However, on a deeper level, these novels are also serious works of social criticism. Written while America was still recovering from the Civil War and adjusting to the abolition of slavery, Twain's two best-known Mississippi River adventure tales also measure the depth of America's new economic and social realities.
His most personal and insightful writing came when he created his, "Final (and Right) Plan"-a free-flowing biography of the thoughts and interests he had toward the end of his life as he spoke his "whole frank mind." Along with the plan, came the instruction that the enclosed autobiography writings not be published in book form until 100 years after his death.
Today, we honor the life and writings of Mark Twain by publishing his personal opus-to reacquaint ourselves with the wit, wisdom, and ideals of this legendary American icon.

The Proper Criticism of Some Decent People A Candid, Unblinking, Unapologetic, Uncompromising Look at the Leadership Crisis in Black America and the Impact on the Leadership of America By Dr. Theophilus Green _____________________________________________ "None of us are born with prejudice. It is not a human response or reaction that comes naturally. Yet, it is a practice that has persisted for nearly five hundred years in what is now the United States of America." With those words, Chicago psychologist Dr. Theophilus Green begins an unflinching analysis of virtually every major luminary to influence American civil rights in the last fifty years. With uncommon results: On O.J. Simpson: L.A. police on the scene may have been confused about the identity of the murderer because blood is red and O.J. is black. But not the psychologists. The reason? They each asked themselves the same question. Who would know Nicole had breast implants, and who would take time to destroy them, -but the guy who paid for them? On Black women: The fully Americanized black woman is a willful, dominating, colorful, controlling, unique mixture of female. You should read that as a compliment, not an editorial. You should also consider it fair warning. On Former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun: Ultimately, finally and unfortunately, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun was always alone. Top the heap, queen of the roost, best seat in the best game in town. She was also the poster woman for every black woman in America. No man, no strong family, no strong support group, surrounded by manipulators, schemers and cons. It's a wonder she survived it at all. On Rev. Jesse Jackson: It is embarrassing to later discover that Rev. Jackson's real motive for going to Washington to counsel the President may have been the opportunity to go skipping down the hotel halls to play with his own girlfriend, who was unlike Lewinsky, pregnant. On Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley: Say what you want about the Mayor of Chicago, his abuse of privilege, the under the table contracts, the investigations that never seem to result in indictments. He can't pronounce the language and only plays fair for a fare. But you have to give the man his due. He takes second to no one in raising a man. Stand up and give the family just applause. His son Patrick Daley is a man for all the right reasons. ("Well done, young man, well done.") Well done, indeed. "Thank you for the monograph. Interesting and Provocative" Colin Powell U.S. Secretary of State "The most important book for every black child in the 21st century." Elmira Mayes, Founder, Director, Loop Lab School "I never thought I would ever read a book that would admit that the Catholic church celibacy hypocrisy breeds pedophiles." Robert Knight, Chairman, Committee to Seek Redress Justice for Children of Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse

'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' Cornel West 'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' Angela Davis 'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle' Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

This one-volume reference work examines a broad range of topics related to the establishment, maintenance, and eventual dismantling of the discriminatory system known as Jim Crow. Many Americans imagine that African Americans' struggle to achieve equal rights has advanced in a linear fashion from the end of slavery until the present. In reality, for more than six decades, African Americans had their civil rights and basic human rights systematically denied in much of the nation. Jim Crow: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic sheds new light on how the systematic denigration of African Americans after slavery-known collectively as "Jim Crow"-was established, maintained, and eventually dismantled. Written in a manner appropriate for high school and junior high students as well as undergraduate readers, this book examines the period of Jim Crow after slavery that is often overlooked in American history curricula. An introductory essay frames the work and explains the significance and scope of this regrettable period in American history. Written by experts in their fields, the accessible entries will enable readers to understand the long hard road before the inception of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century while also gaining a better understanding of the experiences of minorities in the United States-African Americans, in particular. Provides a one-stop source of information for students researching the period of American history dominated by the discriminatory system of Jim Crow laws Puts phenomena such as "Sundown towns" within a larger framework of official discrimination Documents the methods used to create, maintain, and dismantle Jim Crow

Detailed profiles bring stories of African American heroism in the U.S. armed forces to life, from the American Revolution through the conflict in Afghanistan. African American war heroes remain largely unsung, their courage and valor relegated to the less traveled corners of history. This work seeks out those heroes-soldiers, sailors, flyers, and marines-who earned their nation's highest medals in defense of freedom and equality. Some of these men and women died on the battlefield. Others returned to civilian life in a segregated country. What they share across time and circumstance is devotion to duty and to the country they defended, even in the face of personal and racial prejudice. Entries profile decorated African Americans from all of the U.S. conflicts since the Revolutionary War. In addition to providing basic biographical data, each profile offers a detailed account of the individual's heroic actions. The book also offers sidebars on events and topics relevant to African Americans in the U.S. armed forces, such as histories of the 54th Massachusetts and the Tuskegee Airmen. Shares 80 detailed biographies of African Americans who earned their nation's highest medals for valor Covers both well-known and more obscure individuals throughout U.S. military history Offers 10 sidebars on important African American segregated units and critical events pertaining to African American participation in the military Includes an introductory essay to provide a conceptual framework for students Features a fact box at the top of each entry to provide at-a-glance information about the recipient and his/her award(s)

When asked to name the first ""militant"" Black characters in film, we might imagine Blaxploitation heroes like Sweetback or Shaft. Yet, as this groundbreaking new book shows, there was a much earlier cycle of films featuring militant Black men - many of which were sponsored by the U.S. government. Militant Visions examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw Black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. Elizabeth Reich traces the figure across a wide variety of movie genres, from action blockbusters like Bataan to patriotic musicals like Stormy Weather. In the process, she reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and Black filmmakers. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic Black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, Black internationalism, and American militarism. She reads the Black soldier in film as inherently transnational, shaped by the displacements of diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of Black artistry and performance. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, it also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself.

The voices of second-generation Korean Americans echo throughout the pages of this book, which is a sensitive exploration of their struggles with minority, marginality, cultural ambiguity, and negative perceptions. Born in the United States, they are still viewed as foreigners because of their Korean appearance. Raised in American society, they are still tied to the cultural expectations of their Korean immigrant parents. While straddling two cultures, these individuals search for understanding and attempt to rewrite their identity in a new way. Through autobiographical reconstruction and identity transformation, they form a unique identity of their own-a Korean American identity. This book follows a group of second-generation Korean American Christians in the English-speaking ministry of a large suburban Korean church. It examines their conflicts with the conservative Korean-speaking ministry ruling the church and their quest to achieve independence and ultimately become a multicultural church.

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his Atlanta World became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. In April 1931 the World had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With The Grapevine of the Black South, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955-68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was "the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner." It didn't create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw.

At the pinnacle of his boxing career during the 1960s and early 1970s, Muhammad Ali seemed to be a cultural symbol of the times. He has been viewed by some as a hero and by others as a rebel, but either way he is arguably the most famous American in the world. This worldly admiration was perhaps best illustrated with his lighting of the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Ali's life is described from his birth to the present, with an emphasis on his career through 1975. The work covers such topics as his various boxing matches including "The Thrilla in Manilla," his religious conversion to the Nation of Islam, the Vietnam War, and his efforts to promote world peace. A timeline provides key events in Ali's life, and the work concludes with a bibliography of print and electronic sources for additional research.

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia-tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the "Year of the Lash"--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.

At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet Placido (Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.

Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under-standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aMoving against the traditional grain of migration scholarship in the United States, McGill forges a compelling cross-sectional dialogue among the languages, discourses, and cultural experiences of native-born and immigrant blacks in the twentieth century.a
"Multicultural Review"

In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act ushered in a huge wave of immigrants from across the Caribbean--Jamaicans, Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans, among others. How have these immigrants and their children negotiated languages of race and ethnicity in American social and cultural politics? As black immigrants, to which America do they assimilate?

Constructing Black Selves explores the cultural production of second-generation Caribbean immigrants in the United States after World War II as a prism for understanding the formation of Caribbean American identity. Lisa D. McGill pays particular attention to music, literature, and film, centering her study around the figures of singer-actor Harry Belafonte, writers Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Piri Thomas, and meringue-hip-hop group Proyecto Uno.

Illuminating the ways in which Caribbean identity has been transformed by mass migration to urban landscapes, as well as the dynamic and sometimes conflicted relationship between Caribbean American and African American cultural politics, Constructing Black Selves is an important contribution to studies of twentieth century U.S. immigration, African American and Afro-Caribbean history and literature, and theories of ethnicity and race.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"Contains valuable information not easily available elsewhere."--"Multicultural Review"

aThe author illuminates our deep racism in very clear ways, including personal experiencesa
--Missiology Book Review

Gayraud S. Wilmore, an internationally renowned scholar of the history of the African American church, is one of the founders of black theology and author of "Black Religion and Black Radicalism," Pragmatic Spirituality brings together some of his most compelling writings to speak to continuing issues in African American Christianity and black theology. The volume makes available for the first time several of Wilmore's previously unpublished essays, including a new chapter on womanist theology written for this book. Each chapter has been thoroughly reviewed and where appropriate reworked for this volume in order to create a coherent work which reveals a consistent "pragmatic spirituality" in African and African American religious practice. This book presents a view of the Christian faith and life at variance with the quest for personal sanctity by emphasizing communal empowerment for humanization and justice.

Pragmatic Spirituality incorporates some of the most engaging of Wilmore's voluminous writings to reinstate a persistent theme: that black or Africentric faith transposes itself from basically numinous and ecstatic elements in African and African diasporic religions to the immediate and practical work of healing and empowering the poor and marginalized. This book transcends a narrow Africentrism to call for a broad acquaintance with a historic motif in black faith that has to do with compassion, justice, equality, and the liberation of all people.

This illuminating volume displays Wilmore's influence on the development of black theology for over fifty years, and introduces his work to a new generation of scholars.

Concerned scholars and educators, since the early 20th century, have asked questions regarding the viability of Black history in k-12 schools. Over the years, we have seen k12 Black history expand as an academic subject, which has altered research questions that deviate from whether Black history is important to know to what type of Black history knowledge and pedagogies should be cultivated in classrooms in order to present a more holistic understanding of the group' s historical significance. Research around this subject has been stagnated, typically focusing on the subject's tokenism and problematic status within education. We know little of the state of k-12 Black history education and the different perspectives that Black history encompasses. The book, Perspectives on Black Histories in Schools, brings together a diverse group of scholars who discuss how k-12 Black history is understood in education. The book's chapters focus on the question, what is Black history, and explores that inquiry through various mediums including its foundation, curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and psychology. The book provides researchers, teacher educators, and historians an examination into how much k12 Black history has come and yet how long it still needed to go.

Daddy There's A Light in the Sky is a series of autobiographical sketches that cover a period from the early 1920's through the early 2000's. The sketches are not set in an orderly chronology but rather as an 85 year old man's mind thought about them. The thoughts were often triggered by some contemporary happening. This collection of writings make entertaining reading. Growing up in a broadly diverse neighborhood gave Twyman the impetus to explore areas of his inner being which shows in his writing.