Written by a team of nationally recognized African American social work professionals with extensive and distinguished backgrounds of HIV/AIDS service, the book examines the crisis facing African American communities. The editors strive to convey to academics, researchers, and students the magnitude of the crisis and that individuals and organizations serving African Americans need to be able to respond to the service delivery needs this crisis brings.

The crisis is evident in the fact that by year 2000 fully 50% of all AIDS cases will be among African Americans--who only constitute 12% of the nation's population. This book serves as a wake-up call and is designed to stimulate discussion and planning for new models of service to all African Americans and HIV prevention, education, and treatment.

Compelling, moving and unexpected portraits of London's poor from a rising star British historian - the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life. Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty - Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Dore. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly - and radically - shows us the city's most compelling period (1780-1870) at street level. From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation - a world that challenges and fascinates us still.

It was 1862, the second year of the Civil War, though Kansans and Missourians had been fighting over slavery for almost a decade. For the 250 Union soldiers facing down rebel irregulars on Enoch Toothman's farm near Butler, Missouri, this was no battle over abstract principles. These were men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, and they were fighting for their own freedom and that of their families. They belonged to the first black regiment raised in a northern state, and the first black unit to see combat during the Civil War. "Soldiers in the Army of Freedom" is the first published account of this largely forgotten regiment and, in particular, its contribution to Union victory in the trans-Mississippi theater of the Civil War. As such, it restores the First Kansas Colored Infantry to its rightful place in American history.
Composed primarily of former slaves, the First Kansas Colored saw major combat in Missouri, Indian Territory, and Arkansas. Ian Michael Spurgeon draws upon a wealth of little-known sources--including soldiers' pension applications--to chart the intersection of race and military service, and to reveal the regiment's role in countering white prejudices by defying stereotypes. Despite naysayers' bigoted predictions--and a merciless slaughter at the Battle of Poison Spring--these black soldiers proved themselves as capable as their white counterparts, and so helped shape the evolving attitudes of leading politicians, such as Kansas senator James Henry Lane and President Abraham Lincoln. A long-overdue reconstruction of the regiment's remarkable combat record, Spurgeon's book brings to life the men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry in their doubly desperate battle against the Confederate forces and skepticism within Union ranks.

"Pell-Mell ... So We Live!" shares a collection of brief, often poignant anecdotes that provide a whimsical glimpse into how people live in the Caribbean, West Indies, and the Virgin Islands. In "Pell-Mell, " justice and nature fuse into one, parenting is skittish, a fugitive blue mongoose is caught red-handed, and the stork learns that delivering babies is safer. Afro-Caribbean Virgin Islander Gilbert Sprauve continues where he left off in his previous collection, "Soundings over Cultural Shoals." Sprauve holds the magnifying glass that peers into a fascinating local culture and offers reflections about a world in and about the Virgin Islands, where a crane dozes in pain, a handy popgun saves a groom-son, and serial eulogies crack frail ribs. "Pell-Mell ... So We Live!" offers a memorable look into the variations of life-from the heart, mind, and soul of a beautiful people-the Virgin Islanders.

How Alonzo overcame the adversities of life and slowed his aging process.

"Masters of the Drum," comprising eight essays and two interviews, examines both celebrated and insufficiently explored Caribbean, African, and African-American lit/orature that asserts the interface between the scribal and the spoken/gestural in Black word art. This triple play--engagement with the three principal regions of the Black world--reflects the author's interest in Black comparative studies, wherein the expressions and emphases of the Black Atlantic tradition (Africa and its diasporas) are deeply exposed and revealingly juxtaposed. The book's apparent eclecticism is intended to help flex the boundaries of Black literary and cultural studies in response to the dangers of a narrow construction of the newly canonical and of an overly particularist critical stance.

In the late 1800s W.E.B. Dubois asked what it really means to be black in America. He raised the spectre of divided loyalties and the blurring of individuality that he called "Double Consciousness". This volume offers an insight into this "dilemma of identity" by asking the seemingly rhetorical question, what does O.J. Simpson have in common with the participants in the Million Man March, the jury that set him free, the people who inexplicably cheered his acquittal, the prosecuting attorney, the black Muslim Louis Farrakhan, or with his own children? Each case involves cross-cutting currents of age, sex, religion, race, ethnicity, class and ideology. But what they share among themselves, and with the rest of the nation, is the firm conviction that they are black. The author aims to reveal the importance of this imaginary bond, this ethnic ethic, this myth of black ethnicity. He explores its creation, its evolution and its role in linking together the many generations of blacks in America. Dr Davis also seeks to show: how this myth connects the slave huts of Alabama to O.J.'s Brentwood estate; how it connects him to his jury emancipators; how it connects Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to discussions of affirmative action; and how it connects an ancient Juffure villager named Kunta Kinte to contemporary slum dwellers in Harlem. The book argues that it is not race that ties these diverse millions together, but a co-operatively developed paradigm shared by blacks and non-blacks alike as to what constitutes an authentic black existence. By de-bunking the myth, the author seeks to point the way to a fuller recognition of the individual differences that blacks have always had but that are becoming more apparent as the opportunity to express them becomes more prevalent.

At the height of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, as hundreds of volunteers prepared for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) compiled hundreds of statements from activists and everyday citizens who endured police abuse and vigilante violence. Fifty-seven of those testimonies appear in Mississippi Black Paper. The statements recount how white officials and everyday citizens employed assassinations, beatings, harassment, and petty meanness to block any change in the state's segregated status quo. The testimonies in Mississippi Black Paper come from well-known civil rights heroes such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and Rita Schwerner, but the book also brings new voices and stories to the fore. Alongside these iconic names appear grassroots activists and everyday people who endured racial terror and harassment for challenging, sometimes in seemingly imperceptible ways, the state's white supremacy. This new edition includes the original foreword by Reinhold Neibuhr and the original introduction by Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter III, as well as Jason Morgan Ward's new introduction that places the book in its context as a vital source in the history of the civil rights movement.