Frederick Douglass, once a slave, was one of the great 19th century American orators and the most important African American voice of his era. This book traces the development of his rhetorical skills, discusses the effect of his oratory on his contemporaries, and analyzes the specific oratorical techniques he employed. The first part is a biographical sketch of Douglass's life, dealing with his years of slavery (1818-1837), his prewar years of freedom (1837-1861), the Civil War (1861-1865), and postwar years (1865-1895). Chesebrough emphasizes the centrality of oratory to Douglass's life, even during the years in slavery. The second part looks at his oratorical techniques and concludes with three speeches from different periods. Students and scholars of communications, U.S. history, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and African American studies will be interested in this book.

The untold story of the Black nationalist group behind the growing popularity of Kwanzaa In spite of the ever-growing popularity of Kwanzaa, the story of the influential Black nationalist organization behind the holiday has never been told. Fighting for Us explores the fascinating history of the US Organization, a Black nationalist group based in California that played a leading role in Black Power politics and culture during the late 1960s and early '70s whose influence is still felt today. Advocates of Afrocentric renewal, US unleashed creative and intellectual passions that continue to fuel debate and controversy among scholars and students of the Black Power movement. Founded in 1965 by Maulana Karenga, US established an extensive network of alliances with a diverse body of activists, artists and organizations throughout the United States for the purpose of bringing about an African American cultural revolution. Fighting for US presents the first historical examination of US' philosophy, internal dynamics, political activism and influence on African American art, making an elaborate use of oral history interviews, organizational archives, Federal Bureau of Investigation files, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources of the period. This book also sheds light on factors contributing to the organization's decline in the early '70s-government repression, authoritarianism, sexism, and elitist vanguard politics. Previous scholarship about US has been shaped by a war of words associated with a feud between US and the Black Panther Party that gave way to a series of violent and deadly clashes in Los Angeles. Venturing beyond the lingering rhetoric of rivalry, this book illuminates the ideological similarities and differences between US's "cultural" nationalism and the Black Panther Party's "revolutionary" nationalism. Today, US's emphasis on culture has endured as evidenced by the popularity of Kwanzaa and the Afrocentrism in Black art and popular media. Engaging and original, Fighting for US will be the definitive work on Maulana Karenga, the US organization, and Black cultural nationalism in America.

Readings in African American Culture: Resistance, Liberation, and Identity from the 1600s to the 21st Century helps readers understand and appreciate the Black experience through readings that illustrate the lives, history, and intersecting cultures of African Americans and the development of a unique African American identity. Early units examine the definition of African American culture through the lens of the cultural trauma of slavery and the power of white privilege in the U.S. Additional units discuss Afrocentrism and the formation of critical race theory. Students read about expressions of Black cultural power, Blackness and Black identity in contemporary society, and issues related to the appropriation of Black culture. The second edition has expanded from four units to seven, with new readings addressing topics such as the appropriation, Black Twitter and resistance, Black athletes, challenging the defense of using racial slurs, and more. Rooted in an interdisciplinary approach, Readings in African American Culture is appropriate for courses on Black culture and will be of interest in any course centered on the effects of race and culture on minority populations.

Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire are considered by many critics and literary historians to be the foremost Caribbean poets of the 20th century, yet they are rarely treated together. This work deals with the two writers within a comparative framework, exploring their poetry as the exemplification of Negritude art and writing from the Caribbean. Josaphat Kubayanda uses non-canonical theories of literary and cultural analysis to discuss the relationships between creative writing, the idea of Africa, and the rediscovery of African values in the Caribbean, and to propose and demonstrate an original Caribbean poetics, anchored in Africa's cultural systems and linked to Afro-American protest thought. Each of the book's chapters focuses on an aspect of the literary development of the African heritage and of the black condition illustrated by Guillen and Cesaire. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to the genesis of Caribbean rhetorical interest in Africa, from the 1920s onward, and places Guillen and Cesaire in the context of Negritude. Chapter 2 addresses the European othering of Africa, and the Negritude critique of this within the non-African traditions. Guillen's and Cesaire's response to the European concept of the universal is discussed in chapter 3, while chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which blackness is caught between racial otherness and trying to integrate into the Caribbean social order. The final two chapters provide an analysis of the polyrhythmic unity of the African cultural system that allows Guillen and Cesaire to make technical innovations, and a conclusion acknowledges the writers' place in Caribbean creative writing. The volume also contains an updated bibliography on Caribbean literature and the African element. This work will be a valuable reference source for courses in Caribbean and African literary studies, Latin American literature, and Afro-American and African culture, and an important addition to both public and academic libraries.

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.

As an African American child growing up in St. Augustine, Florida, author Gerald Eubanks had a hard time seeing the victories won during the Civil War in action. Blacks were excluded from opportunities afforded to his white neighbors. Schools were aggressively segregated. Racial tensions simmered. The town's sheriff deputized members of the notorious Ku Klux Klan to ensure continued white supremacy.

It was through the persistence of quiet, unsung heroes that progress began to appear. Here, he celebrates the little-known champions of the movement-those who demonstrated tirelessly, picketed fearlessly, encouraged, consoled, stood tall, and never wavered in their determination to do the right thing despite overwhelming opposition.

"The Dark before Dawn" is Gerald's very personal story of the struggles of life in St. Augustine, Florida, during the civil rights movements of the late 1950s and beyond. It is a tribute to the hundreds of ordinary people who risked everything to so that the lives of generations of others might be better. Those familiar with the events of the era credit the Eubanks family with making the significant contributions to the advance of human and civil rights, but their story has gone unheralded-until now. Gerald Eubanks lived through those turbulent times, and now he reminds readers that the fight for civil rights goes on today. He warns that without vigilance, we may find ourselves in the dark before the dawn once again.

This handbook fills major gaps in the child and adolescent mental health literature by focusing on the unique challenges and resiliencies of African American youth. It combines a cultural perspective on the needs of the population with best-practice approaches to interventions. Chapters provide expert insights into sociocultural factors that influence mental health, the prevalence of particular disorders among African American adolescents, ethnically salient assessment and diagnostic methods, and the evidence base for specific models. The information presented in this handbook helps bring the field closer to critical goals: increasing access to treatment, preventing misdiagnosis and over hospitalization, and reducing and ending disparities in research and care. Topics featured in this book include: The epidemiology of mental disorders in African American youth. Culturally relevant diagnosis and assessment of mental illness. Uses of dialectical behavioral therapy and interpersonal therapy. Community approaches to promoting positive mental health and psychosocial well-being. Culturally relevant psychopharmacology. Future directions for the field. The Handbook of Mental Health in African American Youth is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians and related professionals in child and school psychology, public health, family studies, child and adolescent psychiatry, family medicine, and social work.

Through a collection and analysis of carefully selected readings, Rethinking Debatable Moments in the Civil Rights Movement: Learning for the Present Moment highlights particular issues, tensions, and dynamics within the Civil Rights Movement. The text asks pointed questions regarding debatable moments of the Civil Rights Movement in order to encourage critical study, stimulate thinking about possible consequences then and now, seek answers or refine the questions, and seek direction for the present moment. The readings are organized in chapters according to the debatable moments: 1) Should the NAACP have pursued the case of Claudette Colvin in combating bus segregation in Montgomery?; 2) Should Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have joined the Freedom Riders when invited to do so in 1961?; 3) Should children have been allowed to participate in the Birmingham Campaign protests in 1963?; 4) Should SNCC's John Lewis have agreed to amend his speech in the 1963 March on Washington?; and 5) Should Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have turned the marchers around at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma after Bloody Sunday? General and chapter introductions and an epilogue explore the context, the key players, the issues, the nature of the crisis, and the consequences and implications of each debatable moment. Rethinking Debatable Moments in the Civil Rights Movement is an excellent supplementary text for courses in anthropology, sociology, black studies, and related social science disciplines.

Making a Place for Ourselves examines an important but not widely chronicled event at the intersection of African-American history and American medical history--the black hospital movement. A practical response to the racial realities of American life, the movement was a "self-help" endeavor--immediate improvement of separate medical institutions insured the advancement and health of African Americans until the slow process of integration could occur. Recognizing that their careers depended on access to hospitals, black physicians associated with the two leading black medical societies, the National Medical Association (NMA) and the National Hospital Association (NHA), initiated the movement in the 1920s in order to upgrade the medical and education programs at black hospitals. Vanessa Northington Gamble examines the activities of these physicians and those of black community organizations, local and federal governments, and major health care organizations. She focuses on three case studies (Cleveland, Chicago, and Tuskegee) to demonstrate how the black hospital movement reflected the goals, needs, and divisions within the African-American community--and the state of American race relations. Examining ideological tensions within the black community over the existence of black hospitals, Gamble shows that black hospitals were essential for the professional lives of black physicians before the emergence of the civil rights movement. More broadly, Making a Place for Ourselves clearly and powerfully documents how issues of race and racism have affected the development of the American hospital system.

Explore the important influence of Japanese-American players on baseball history in California.

"This colection brings together two generations of scholarship on many important topics in African-American religious history. . . . A useful and judiciously chosen compilation that should serve well in the classroom."
-- "Religious Studies Review"

"It serves as a smorgasbord of the study of black spirituality."
-- "Black Issues Book Review"

Down by the Riverside provides an expansive introduction to the development of African American religion and theology. Spanning the time of slavery up to the present, the volume moves beyond Protestant Christianity to address a broad diversity of African American religion from Conjure, Orisa, and Black Judaism to Islam, African American Catholicism, and humanism.

This accessible historical overview begins with African religious heritages and traces the transition to various forms of Christianity, as well as the maintenance of African and Islamic traditions in antebellum America. Preeminent contributors include Charles Long, Gayraud Wilmore, Albert Raboteau, Manning Marable, M. Shawn Copeland, Vincent Harding, Mary Sawyer, Toinette Eugene, Anthony Pinn, and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya. They consider the varieties of religious expression emerging from migration from the rural South to urban areas, African American women's participation in Christian missions, Black religious nationalism, and the development of Black Theology from its nineteenth-century precursors to its formulation by James Cone and later articulations by black feminist and womanist theologians. They also draw on case studies to provide a profile of the Black Christian church today.

This thematic history of the unfolding of religious life in AfricanAmerica provides a window onto a rich array of African American people, practices, and theological positions.

In "The Last Crusade, " Gerald McKnight examines the Poor People's Campaign, the last large-scale demonstration of civil rights-era America, and the systematic efforts of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his executive officers to subvert King's ambitious effort to force the federal government to live up to its promises of a Great Society. The book also looks at King's last days as he helped Memphis sanitation workers in their labor-cum-civil rights struggle with a recalcitrant and racist city government. Although there is no persuasive evidence that the FBI and the Memphis police conspired to assassinate King, McKnight marshals evidence to show that neither agency was blameless.The conventional view of the Poor People's Campaign is that it was a self-inflicted failure. The blame rested squarely on the shoulders of the second-raters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who failed to fill the leadership vacuum after King's assassination. But, as McKnight shows, there was a hidden, dark counterpoint to the accepted version--namely, the triumph of the 1960s American surveillance state and its repressive power and flagrant violation of protected freedoms. In fact, whatever the FBI wanted to do to disrupt the Campaign, it did, aided and abetted by local police agencies and elements of the federal government, including military intelligence.

In this first full-length study of Emecheta's fiction, Fishburn highlights the difficulties inherent in reading across cultures. She challenges the notion that all we need to understand African texts is a willingness to be open to them, arguing that too many of the cultural and critical preconceptions we bring to these texts interfere with our ability to understand them. Directly responding to Western feminist criticism written about Emecheta, this study argues that Emecheta herself is not a feminist in the Western sense and that her novels should not be construed as reflecting this political interest. In close readings of eight of her best known works, this study reveals a complex narrative voice which is far more supportive of Emecheta's own African culture and its tradition than has been recognized previously.

The African has been separated from his Black American brothers and sisters since the dawn of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Millions of Africans were forcibly ejected from their native soil, separated from their loved ones-their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and torn from the lives they once knew, and transplanted into a new world. Essentially, the black American has become a new person in a new world with a unique experience. After hundreds of years in the new world, coupled with their unique experience; how do they view, or see, or relate or perceive or better yet interact with their African kith and kin they left on the African continent, who are now 'voluntarily' joining them in America in exodus proportions fleeing the life of grinding poverty, deprivation, hunger, dictatorships, helplessness, and all kinds of diseases? The authors spent more than twenty five years trying to find out answers to these questions.

"Thoughtful, provocative . . . a first-rate study."
--"Library Journal"

"Not the least of this book's many virtues is the way in which . . . it bridges the gap between the concern's of Du Bois's day and those of the civil rights era."
--Times Literary Supplement

"A rich and moving account of the complex life of one of the most influential black figures in twentieth-century America."
"aHerbert Hill, Evjue-Bascom Professor of African-American Studies, University of Wisconsin"

"We need this book to remind us of the competent leadership that we enjoyed in the past."
--"Black Issues Book Review"

"This work is a welcome addition to African American studies as well as to social and cultural history..."
--"Choice"

Activist, international statesman, reluctant black leader, scholar, icon, father and husband, Ralph Bunche is one of the most complicated and fascinating figures in the history of twentieth- century America. Bunche played a central role in shaping international relations from the 1940s through the 1960s, first as chief of the Africa section of the Office of Strategic Services and then as part of the State Department group working to establish the United Nations. After moving to the U.N. as Director of Trusteeship, he became the first black Nobel Laureate in 1950 and was subsequently named Undersecretary of the U.N.

For nearly a decade, he was the most celebrated contemporary African American both domestically and abroad. Today he is virtually forgotten.

Charles Henry's penetrating biography counters this historical tragedy, recapturing the essence of Bunche's service to America and the world. Moreover, Henry ably demonstrates how Bunche's riseand fall as a public symbol tells us as much about America as it does about Bunche. His iconic status, like that of other prominent, mainstream black figures like Colin Powell, required a constant struggle over the relative importance of his racial identity and his national identity. Henry's biography shines as both the recovered story of a classic American, and as a case study in the racial politics of public service.

No other word in the English language is more endemic to contemporary Black American culture and identity than "Soul." Since the 1960s Soul has been frequently used to market and sell music, food, and fashion. However, Soul also refers to a pervasive belief in the capacity of the Black body/spirit to endure the most trying of times in an ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. While some attention has been given to various genre manifestations of Soul-as in Soul music and food-no book has yet fully explored the discursive terrain signified by the term. In this broad-ranging, free-spirited book, a diverse group of writers, artists, and scholars reflect on the ubiquitous but elusive concept of Soul. Topics include: politics and fashion, Blaxploitation films, language, literature, dance, James Brown, and Schoolhouse Rock. Among the contributors are Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Paul Gilroy, Lyle Ashton Harris, Michelle Wallace, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Manthia Diawara, and dream hampton.

Reena wants to be a star...
...A Bollywood star. Unfortunately, her family won't stand for it. It doesn't help that Reena is only eight-years-old. However, a beacon of hope arrives in the form of Uncle Jessi. He's just emigrated from India to America, and is a welcome addition to her family household. Uncle Jessi and Reena share a special bond. Not only are they old pen pals, but he recognizes her desperation to become a Bollywood actress.
One day, Uncle Jessi plans a secret surprise. He invites her to take part in a pretend acting game. Reena jumps at the chance. At first, she enjoys swinging her hips to Bollywood beats. She smiles brightly at his camera. However, halfway through her performance matters take an unexpected turn. The end results surprise both Reena and Uncle Jessi.
Important lessons come through an action-driven story and beautiful illustrations:
Children will learn that sexual abuse is NEVER their fault.Parents and children will be given a launching pad to discuss the warning signs of "grooming."Children will come away knowing they have the power to say: "NO."Children will discover that sexual abuse can occur in any cultural group.Children can be assured that they will be believed when reporting inappropriate behavior.Therapists and parents can exhibit that sexual abuse isn't an off-limits topic.Child abuse survivors will come away knowing they are not alone.
Therapists' Acclaim for "Reena's Bollywood Dream"
""Reena's Bollywood Dream" is exceptionally well-written. It works as an educational piece to foster awareness to children and their families regarding the realities of sexual abuse within the South Asian community. This informative book can help alter a child's life for the better."
--Sadia Khaliq, B.A., B.S.W., M.S.W., Community Treatment Coordinator, Centre for Addictionand Mental Health
"With a captivating story and beautiful illustration, and with a message that is cross-cultural and educational, Reena's Bollywood Dream can help children understand the sad reality that there are those who can hurt them but there is also means of staying safe--with others' help. I recommend this book highly to all families; it can be instrumental to starting a conversation about a difficult topic."
--Pamela Pine, PhD, MPH, Founder and CEO, Stop the Silence
For more info see www.JewelKats.com
Juvenile Fiction: Social Issues - Sexual Abuse
Family & Relationships: Abuse - Child Abuse
Social Science: Ethnic Studies - Asian American Studies