The African American Experience

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Black is the body: stories from my grandmother’s time, my mother’s time, and mine / Emily Bernard.

A collection of deeply personal essays explores the complexities and paradoxes of growing up black in the South with a white surname as well as the author's experiences with interracial marriage, international adoption and teaching at a Northern white college. (Atlas Pub.)

Black Radical: the life and times of William Monroe Trotter / Kerri Greenidge.

A portrait of the lesser-known, turn-of-the-20th-century civil rights activist explores how he used his influence as an emancipator and the editor of the Guardian to promote gradualist politics and rally black working-class Americans throughout the post-Reconstruction era. (Atlas Pub.)

A Black women’s history of the United States / Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross.

Two award-winning history professors and authors focus on the stories of African-American women slaves, civilians, religious leaders, artists, queer icons, activists and criminals in a celebration of black womanhood that demonstrates its indelible role in shaping America. (Atlas Pub.)

Breathe: a letter to my sons / Imani Perry.

A Princeton University professor of African-American studies explores the terror, grace and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America, sharing insights into what it means to parent children in a persistently unjust world. (Atlas Pub.)

Conversations in Black: on power, politics, and leadership / Ed Gordon.

A collection of conversations with such notables as Stacey Abrams, Harry Belafonte, Charlamagne tha God, Michael Eric Dyson, Jemele Hill, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters and others offers sage wisdom for navigating race in a radically divisive America. (Atlas Pub.)

 

The fire is upon us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the debate over race in America / Nicholas Buccola.

Looks at how the clash between civil rights firebrand James Baldwin and the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., continues to illuminate America's racial divide. (Atlas Pub.)

 

Olympic pride: American prejudice: the untold story of 18 African Americans who defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to compete in the 1936 Olympics / Deborah Riley Draper and Travis Thrasher.

Describes the inspiring story of 18 African Americans, including Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson’s brother Mack, who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics despite the racism at home and abroad in this companion to the upcoming documentary. (Atlas Pub.)

 

Slavery’s descendants: shared legacies of race and reconciliation.

Slavery's Descendants brings together twenty-five contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, to tell their personal stories of exhuming and exorcising America's racist past. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery and reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time. (Baker & Taylor)

 

The Toni Morrison book club.

Four friends; black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born&;offer a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we make space to find ourselves in fiction and turn to Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life. (Baker & Taylor)

 

What it is: race, family, family, and one thinking Black man’s blues / Clifford Thompson.

An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America. (Random House)

By HeatherL on February 7, 2020