On July 9, 1883, twenty men stormed the jail in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, kidnapped Henderson Lee, a black man charged with larceny, and hanged him. Events like this occurred thousands of times across the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet we know scarcely more about any of these other victims than we do about Henderson Lee. Drawing on new sources to provide the most comprehensive portrait of the men and women lynched in the American South, Amy Bail...

What is real reconciliation? This collection of essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from across Canada welcomes readers into a timely, healing conversation—one we've longed for but, before now, have had a hard time approaching.These reflective and personal pieces come from journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, filmmakers, city planners, and lawyers, all of whom share their personal light-bulb moments regarding when and how they grappled w...

Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for DramaSurprising, luminous, and powerful. It will mostl likely find a place in the American canon alongside Uhry's Driving Miss Daisy. —Laurie Winer, Los Angeles TimesA timeless American play, which inspired the Academy Award–winning film, Driving Miss Daisy is a delicate depiction of racial tensions and growing old. Set in Atlanta, Alfred Uhry tells the affecting story of the ...

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation.

Three plays that solidified Athol Fugard's indelible mark on theatre.The brothers of Blood Knot—one dark-skinned, one light—betray their dreams of a better future with the impossible wish of passing for white. In Hello and Goodbye, a poor white brother and sister churn through their once-promising past to comprehend their bleak present. Boseman and Lena, a black husband and wife, trudge through a severe and unforgiving landscape, discover...

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar OaklandAs the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights a...

Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of Black people, a history of vicious racial terror and concurrent Black resistance is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in the collection of essays that is Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self-Determination in Jackson Mississippi.Undeterred by the uncertainty, anxiety and fear brought about by the steady deterioration of the neoliberal order over the last few years,...

Thousands of children attended summer camps in twentieth-century Ontario. Did parents simply want a break, or were broader developments at play? The Nurture of Nature explores how competing cultural tendencies – antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity – shaped the development of summer camps and, consequently, modern social life in North America. A valuable resource for those interested in the connections between the history o...

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the increasingly important and controversial subject of race relations in Brazil. North American scholars of race relations frequently turn to Brazil for comparisons, since its history has many key similarities to that of the United States. Brazilians have commonly compared themselves with North Americans, and have traditionally argued that race relations in Brazil are far more harmonious because the country encourages race mixture rath...

Issuing a powerful call for constructive social action, the popular radio and television commentator Tavis Smiley has assembled the voices of leading African American artists, intellectuals, and politicians from Chuck D to Cornel West to Maxine Waters. How to Make Black America Better takes a pragmatic, solutions-oriented approach that includes Smiley’s own ten challenges to the African American community.Smiley and his contributors stress the family tie, the power...

Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and original study of how law invents categories of identificatio...

America has changed, however the disparity of equality between white and African Americans have not. African Americans are still statistically unemployed more than whites, statistically first in receiving welfare benefits and first in violent crimes reporting. Today, African Americans and white people have similarly the same problem, earnestly trying to provide a better future for their children and families. In this technological age, more teenagers and young adults are experiencing more ...