african americans

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african americans

We are the culture

Black Chicago's influence on everything
2024
"Journalist Arionne Nettles believes it is time Black Chicagoans receive the acclaim, the honor, and the acknowledgment for their contributions to American culture and their recognition of where they truly came from. During the Great Migration, more than a half-million Black Americans moved from the South to Chicago, and with them, they brought the blues, amplifying what would be one of the city's greatest musical artforms. In 1958, the iconic Johnson Publishing company, the voice of Black America, launched the Ebony Fashion Fair show, leading to the creation of the first makeup brand for Black skin. For three decades starting in the 1970s, households across the country were transported to a stage in Chicago as they moved their hips in front of TV screens airing Soul Train. Chicago is where Oprah Winfrey, a Black woman who did not have the "traditional look" TV managers pushed on talent, premiered her talk show, which went on to break every record possible and solidify her position as the "Queen of Daytime TV." It's where Hall of Famer Michael Jordan led the Bulls to six championships, including two three-peats, making the NBA a must-see attraction worldwide and wearing Jordans a style symbol to this day. And it's home to Grammy-winner Chance the Rapper, whose work honors the city's cultural institutions, from the White Sox to modern art superstar Hebru Brantley. It all happened right here, in Chicago. For the past century, Black Chicago's influence has permeated not just the city but, really, what we see as modern-day pop culture throughout the country and, in some ways, the world"--.

Rising from the rails

Pullman porters and the making of the Black middle class
2005
Traces the social history of the Pullman porters, African-American men who served the Pullman Company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on how their experiences shaped the African-American middle class.

The Philadelphia Negro

A Social Study
2004
2017 Reprint of 1899 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological study of African Americans in Philadelphia written by W. E. B. Du Bois. Commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania and published in 1899 with the intent of identifying social problems present in the African American community, it was the first sociological case study of a black community in the United States and one of the earliest examples of sociology as a statistically based social science. Du Bois began to gather information for the study in August 1896. He deduced that, "the Negro problem looked at in one way is but the old-world questions of ignorance, poverty, crime, and the dislike of the stranger." He supports these claims with a statistical breakdown of the lives of African-Americans, their neighborhoods, incomes, etc. More than one hundred years after its original publication, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship--the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it.

Under the heron's light

2024
Told in alternating timelines, African American Atlas learns of her ancestral powers and their connection to the Great Dismal Swamp which shielded her grandmother as a formerly enslaved girl in the 1700s.

Smoketown

the untold story of the other great Black Renaissance
2018
Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson?s famed plays about noble, but doomed, working-class citizens. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson?and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.

American uprising

the untold story of America's largest slave revolt
2012
Historian Daniel Rasmussen reveals the long-forgotten history of America?s largest slave uprising, the New Orleans slave revolt of 1811. No North American slave uprising?not Gabriel Prosser, not Denmark Vesey, not Nat Turner?has rivaled the scale of this rebellion either in terms of the number of the slaves involved or in terms of the number who were killed. Over 100 slaves were slaughtered by federal troops and French planters, who then sought to write the event out of history and prevent the spread of the slaves? revolutionary philosophy. With the Haitian Revolution a recent memory and the War of 1812 looming on the horizon, the revolt had epic consequences for America.

The Mis-education of The Negro

2020
The impact of slavery on the Black psyche is explored and questions are raised about our education system, such as what and who African Americans are educated for, the difference between education and training, and which of these African Americans are receiving.

The price of the ticket

collected nonfiction, 1948-1985
2021
"A . . . compendium of James Baldwin's . . . nonfiction work, calling on us 'to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country'"--Provided by publisher.

A passionate mind in relentless pursuit

the vision of Mary McLeod Bethune
2024
"An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America's towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation When Mary MacLeod Bethune died, many of the tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the "Mount Rushmore" of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capital, and yet for most Americans, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue on our journey towards a freer and more just nation. Any serious effort to understand how the Black Civil Rights generation found role models, vision, and inspiration during their midcentury struggle for political power must place Bethune at its heart. Her success was unlikely: the 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age 29, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida school she herself had founded. In short order, the school enrolled hundreds of children and eventually would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency. She played a big game, and a long game, enrolling Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause. Rooks grew up in Florida, in Bethune's shadow: her grandparents trained to be teachers at Bethune-Cookman University, and her family vacationed at the all-Black beach that Bethune helped found in one of her many entrepreneurial projects for the community. The story of how-in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country-Bethune carved out so much space, and how she catapulted from there onto the national stage, is, in Rooks' hands, a moving and astonishing example of the power of a will and a vision that had few equals. Now, when the gains and losses in the long struggle for full Black equality in this country feel particularly near-and centered on the state of Florida-, it is an enormous gift to have this brilliant and lyrical reckoning with Bethune's journey from one of our own great educators and scholars of that same struggle"--.

Our shouts echo

2024
Sixteen-year-old Niarah's perspective on life changes when she joins a hiking/camping club and befriends Mac Torres and his wanderlust-driven friends, but as summer draws to a close and her new friends leave, existential dread challenges her new outlook.

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