Racism

Reviewed: TLS 21 June 2019 p. 7.
Description: Award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event in Chicago's history–which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries–through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present. (publ.)

Description: After four decades of mass incarceration in the U.S., the disproportionate number of black men in prisons has contributed to an epidemic of black women struggling to support fragile families. Yet the literature is scant on how African American women are affected by the imprisonment of their partners. Drawing on case studies and firsthand accounts, the author brings needed perspective to the political, economic and psychological challenges they face. (publ.)

A fictionalized account of the 1992 Rodney King trial and its aftermath in Los Angeles.

Reviewed: LJ 1 Nov. 2017 p. 92
Description: An anthology documenting the lessons and experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. These brief, trenchant essays offer glimpses into the hard-fought struggle to exercise one’s autonomy, creativity and dignity. … In a time when rights are being taken away from people, these women stand in the power of inclusion, the right to self-identify, social justice and equality. (publ.)

Description: This book explains the ideas, tactics, history, and prominent figures of the so-called Alt-Right, a white nationalist movement that first gained national and international prominence during the 2016 presidential election. It describes this movement’s place in contemporary American life, and how the Alt-Right relates to Donald Trump’s much larger right-wing populist movement. In clear and dispassionate terms, the book explains the degree to which the Alt-Right and other elements of the modern white supremacist movement threaten American democracy. In recent years, the so-called Alt-Right, a white nationalist movement, has grown at an alarming rate. Taking advantage of high levels of racial polarization, the Alt-Right seeks to normalize explicit white identity politics. Growing from a marginalized and disorganized group of Internet trolls and propagandists, the Alt-Right became one of the major news stories of the 2016 presidential election, and exploded into public consciousness after its march through Charlottesville in summer 2017. Discussions of the Alt-Right are now a regular part of political discourse in the United States and beyond. (publ.)

Description: The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In this book, historian Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed German immigrants for their “strange and foreign ways.” Americans’ anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement in the 1850s. Over the century that followed, Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Central Americans, and the so-called browning of America. Xenophobia has not been an exception to America’s immigration tradition, an episodic aberration on an inevitable march toward inclusion. It is, in fact, Lee argues, an American tradition in its own right, deeply embedded in our society, economy, and politics, forcing us to confront this history, Lee explains how xenophobia works, why it has endured, and how it threatens us all. It is a necessary corrective and spur to action for any concerned citizen. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Oct. 2018 p. 69.
Description: Contrary to popular belief, the poor and huddled masses were never welcome in America. Though the engraving on the base of the Statue of Liberty makes that claim, history reveals a far less-welcoming message. This comprehensive survey of cultural and racial exclusion in the United States examines the legacy of hostility toward immigrants over two centuries. The authors document abuses against Catholics in the early 19th century in response to the influx of German and Irish immigrants; hostility against Mexicans throughout the Southwest, where signs in bars and restaurants read, “No Dogs, No Negros, No Mexicans”; “yellow peril” fears leading to a ban on Chinese immigration for ten years; punitive measures against Native Americans traditions, which became punishable by fines and hard labor; the persecution of German Americans during World War I and Japanese Americans during World War II; the refusal to admit Jewish refugees of the Holocaust; and the ongoing legacy of mistreating African Americans from slavery to the injustices of the present day. Though the authors note that the United States has accepted tens of millions of immigrants during its relatively short existence, its troubling history of persecution is often overlooked. President Donald Trump’s targeting of Muslim and Mexican immigrants is just the most recent chapter in a long, sad history of social panics about “evil” foreigners who are made scapegoats due to their ethnicity or religious beliefs. (publ.)

Description: The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia’s roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system? Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 28 Jan. 2019 p. 91; PW 22 Apr. 2019 p. 20.
Description: This book examines the DNA of the ideologies that shape our nation, ideologies that are as American as apple pie but that too often justify and perpetuate racist ideas and racial inequalities. Martin Luther King challenged us to investigate the “ideational roots of race hate” and Ghosts does just that by examining a philosophical “trinity”–Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith–whose works collectively imagined, institutionalized, and ingrained racist ideologies into the hearts and minds of the American people. (publ.)

Description: Antifa has received public attention since the election of President Trump. To some, this was believed to represent the rise of white supremacy and authoritarianism in the United States, which Antifa made it a point to combat at any cost. What exactly is the Antifa movement? Are its militant, sometimes violent attempts to combat fascism justified, or are they just as morally reprehensible as what they are reacting against? This volume looks at Antifa’s place in American and international history, as well as its organization, goals, and ethical implications, offering a clearer look at this enigmatic movement. (publ.)
Note: Standing Order.

Reviewed: TLS 24 Jan. 2020 p. 36.
Description: Against an increasingly polarizing political backdrop, this book takes a visual journey through over a hundred years of social protest. From the early twentieth century suffragettes through to the 1960s and 1970s–considered by many the heyday of uprisings–and contemporary, social media-driven demonstrations of dissent, this illustrative history features iconic posters from world-renowned artists, including notable posters from the archives of Amnesty International, as well as more spontaneous ephemera from short-lived print collectives and street activists. With a foreword from celebrated artist and activist, Anish Kapoor, The Art of Protest showcases more than 100 posters. It covers key campaigns such as women’s liberation, nuclear disarmament, the civil rights movement, climate change, AIDS activism, and Black Lives Matter, revealing artists who have pushed boundaries, given voice to the marginalized, and railed against those who seek to deny people their rights to peace and equality. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title).
Description: Among the most well-known YouTubers are a cadre of talented Asian American performers, including comedian Ryan Higa and makeup artist Michelle Phan. Yet beneath the sheen of these online success stories lies a problem–Asian Americans remain sorely underrepresented in mainstream film and television. When they do appear on screen, they are often relegated to demeaning stereotypes such as the comical foreigner, the sexy girlfriend, or the martial arts villain. The story that remains untold is that as long as these inequities have existed, Asian Americans have been fighting back–joining together to protest offensive imagery, support Asian American actors and industry workers, and make their voices heard. Providing a cultural history and ethnography, Asian American Media Activism assesses everything from grassroots collectives in the 1970s up to contemporary engagements by fan groups, advertising agencies, and users on YouTube and Twitter. (publ.)

Description: While Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests reignited the debate surrounding athletes and political activism, the relationship between the two is a longstanding tradition. The athletic field has long been a site for protests against racism, hosting key events in the fight for equality, such as legendary African American baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1947 induction into the MLB. Recent protests have expanded to issues like sexism, LGBT rights, and immigration, and have made use of social media and other modern developments. This volume examines the controversies surrounding athlete activism as well as its place in history and contemporary politics. (publ.)
Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: CHE 29 Apr. 2018 (online; book excerpt); LJ 15 Apr. 2018 p. 83.
Description: When George Yancy penned a New York Times article entitled “Dear White America,” he knew that he was courting controversy. Here, Yancy chronicles the ensuing blowback as he seeks to understand what it was that created so much rage among so many white readers. He challenges white Americans to develop a new empathy for the African American experience. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (“Fresh Air” 5/8/2018; & 2 other on air reviews); LJ 1 May 2018 p. 78.
Description: In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past–memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon master-fully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. (publ.)
Note: Previously unpublished work by Hurston (1891-1960) now postumously released.

Reviewed: LR May 2018 p. 37; NYRB 25 Oct. 2018 p. 46; Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Sarah Churchwell offers a surprising account of twentieth-century Americans’ fierce battle for the nation’s soul. It follows the stories of two phrases–the “American dream” and “America First”–that once embodied opposing visions for America. Starting as a Republican motto before becoming a hugely influential isolationist slogan during World War I, America First was always closely linked with authoritarianism and white supremacy. The American dream, meanwhile, initially represented a broad vision of democratic and economic equality. Churchwell traces these notions through the 1920s boom, the Depression, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, laying bare the persistent appeal of demagoguery in America and showing us how it was resisted. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 10 Feb. 2019 p. 18; PW 19 Nov. 2018 p. 90.
Description: A slave family is distressed when they discover their son Ben has run away. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 31 Mar. 2019 p. 12; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 96.
Description: On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. The blast killed four young girls and injured twenty-two others. The FBI suspected four particularly radical Ku Klux Klan members. Yet due to reluctant witnesses, a lack of physical evidence, and pervasive racial prejudice the case was closed without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously expressed it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Years later, Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the case, ultimately convicting one of the bombers in 1977. Another suspect passed away in 1994, and then-US Attorney Doug Jones tried and convicted the final two in 2001 and 2002. This represented the correction of an outrageous miscarriage of justice nearly forty years in the making. Jones went on to win election as Alabama’s first Democratic Senator since 1992 in a dramatic race against Re-publican challenger Roy Moore. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 6 May 2018 p. 12; NPR (Book Review 4/24/2018)
Description: In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a “husky Negro” did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. Crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who is protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence come to the surface. (publ.)

Review: TLS 22 Mar. 2019 p. 11.
Description: Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A black man born into slavery in Alabama, he was an eyewitness to history–the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. Traylor would not live to see the civil rights movement, but he was among those who laid its foundation. Starting around 1939, Traylor–by then in his late eighties and living on the streets of Montgomery–took up pencil and paintbrush to at-test to his existence and point of view. In keeping with this radical step, the paintings and drawings he made are visually striking and politically assertive; they include simple yet powerful distillations of tales and memories as well as spare, vibrantly colored abstractions. When Traylor died, he left behind more than one thousand works of art. Leslie Umberger considers more than two hundred artworks to provide the most comprehensive and in-depth study of the artist to date; she examines his life, art, and powerful drive to bear witness through the only means he had, pictures. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 2 July 2018 p. 60.
Description: Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyonce’s “Don't Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on non-traditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyonce’s black femmeinism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the sub-text of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics. In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s bestselling cultural histories, this book is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 94; NYT/BR 28 Apr. 2019 p. 16; LJ Mar. 2019 p. 137.
Description: You don’t have to be racist to be biased. Unconscious bias can be at work without our realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice. With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Jennifer Eberhardt offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward. Eberhardt works extensively as a consultant to law enforcement and as a psychologist at the forefront of this new field. Her research takes place in courtrooms and boardrooms, in prisons, on the street, and in classrooms and coffee shops. She shows us the subtle–and sometimes dramatic–daily repercussions of implicit bias in how teachers grade students, or managers deal with customers. It has an enormous impact on the conduct of criminal jus-tice, from the rapid decisions police officers have to make to sentencing practices in court. Eberhardt’s work and her book are both influenced by her own life, and the personal stories she shares emphasize the need for change. … Unblinking about the tragic consequences of prejudice, Eber-hardt addresses how racial bias is not the fault of nor restricted to a few “bad apples” but is present at all levels of society in media, education, and business. The good news is that we are not hopelessly doomed by our in-nate prejudices. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 22 Dec. 2016 p. 89.
Description: "All men are created equal" is America's most cherished proposition. But for more than a century after Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, the Founding Fathers and their successors failed to extend the promise of the Declaration of Independence to blacks and Indians. Why? We take refuge in the notion that white people at the time were the prisoners of racist ideas and that we today are more enlightened. In this popular view, the history of America demonstrates how racist beliefs have been slowly discarded, with later generations realizing the dream of liberty and equality. But as Nick Guyatt argues in this book, white Americans from the founding to the Civil War were not confident racists who blithely condemned blacks and Indians to inferior status. Instead, they were confused and tortured souls, and often remarkably conscious of the damage that racism might do to the nation's future. They looked for ways to reconcile their principles and their prejudices, and sometimes succeeded: in the first decades of the United States, blacks went to the polls alongside whites in some northern states, and federal officials promoted intermarriage between Indians and frontier settlers in the hope that racial divisions would disappear in the West. (publ.)

Description: This book analyzes enduring racial divides in homeownership, work, and income using the politics of respectability concept. It also examines an alternative way of understanding the Black Lives Matter movement, NFL protests, and challenges facing various black ethnic groups. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 30 Oct. 2017 p. 67
Description: Throughout American history black people are the only group of people to have been forbidden by law to learn to read. This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. (publ.)

When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (New books); Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: What is it about basketball that makes it “the black man’s game?” And what about pickup basketball in particular: can it tell us something about the state of blackness in the United States? Reflecting on these questions, Rafik Mohamed presents pickup games as a text of the political, social, and economic struggles of African American men. In the process, he tells a story about race in its peculiarly American context, and about how the politics of race—and resistance—are mediated through sports. A. Rafik Mohamed is professor of sociology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University San Bernardino.

Description: In the 1960s and 70s, the two most important black nationalist organizations, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, gave voice and agency to the most economically and politically isolated members of black communities outside the South. Though vilified as fringe and extremist, these movements proved to be formidable agents of influence during the civil rights era, ultimately giving birth to the Black Power movement. (publ.)

Description: Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons–yet liberalism has refused equality to those it saw as sub-persons. Liberalism is the creed of fairness–yet liberalism has been complicit with European imperialism and African slavery. Liberalism is the classic ideology of Enlightenment and political transparency–yet liberalism has cast a dark veil over its actual racist past and present. In sum, liberalism’s promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color. Political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in self-conceived liberal polities today. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 25 Nov. 2016 p. 14 (2016 Books of the Year)
Description: Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they'd founded the county's thriving black churches. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. Soon bands of white 'night riders' launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to 'abandoned' land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten, as locals kept Forsyth 'all white' well into the 1990s. Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Reveals the underlying centrality of “blood” that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 9 Apr. 2018 p. 66; LJ 15 May 2018 p. 66; NYT 22 Sept. 2019 p. SR 6.
Description: The American frontier is one of our most cherished and enduring national images. We think of the early settlers who tamed the wilderness and built the bones of our great country as courageous, independent–and white. In this groundbreaking work of deep historical research, Anna-Lisa Cox shows that this history simply isn't accurate. In fact, she has found a stunning number of black settlements on the frontier–in the thousands. Though forgotten today, these homesteads were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence challenged rationalizations for slavery and pushed the question toward a crisis–one that was not resolved until the eruption of the Civil War. Blending meticulous detail with lively storytelling, Cox brings historical recognition to the brave people who managed not just to secure their freedom but begin a battle that is still going on today–a battle for equality. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 21 Apr. 2017 p. 28
Description: This book explores human remains as objects for research and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Influenced by early skull collectors such as Samuel George Morton, zealous scientists at museums in the United States established human skeletal collections. Museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Field Museum of Natural History established their own collections. Universities soon followed, with bones collected for Penn, Berkeley, and Harvard. American Indian remains collected from the American West arrived at museums at an increasingly fervent pace, and the project swiftly became global in scope. Coinciding with a high-water mark in Euro-American colonialism, collecting bones became a unique and evolving expression of colonialism experienced through archaeological, anthropological, and anatomical study of race and the body via work with human remains collections. In revealing this story, The Great Bone Race surveys shifts away from racial classification theories toward emerging ideas regarding human origins, arguing that the study of human remains contributed significantly to changing ideas about race and human history. These ideas were hotly contested, and competition to collect and exhibit rare human remains from around the world thrust ideas about race and history into the public realm through prominent museum displays visited by millions. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 11/6/2019 (referenced)
Description: LBJ’s towering political skills and his ambitious slate of liberal legislation are the stuff of legend: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and environmental reform. But what happened after the bills passed? One man could not and did not go it alone. Joshua Zeitz reanimates the creative and contentious atmosphere inside Johnson’s White House as a talented and energetic group of advisers made LBJ’s vision a reality. They desegregated public and private institutions throughout one third of the United States; built Medicare and Medicaid from the ground up in one year; launched federal funding for public education; provided food support for millions of poor children and adults; and launched public television and radio, all in the space of five years, even as Vietnam strained the administration’s credibility and budget. Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, Joe Califano, Harry McPherson and the other staff members who comprised LBJ’s inner circle were men as pragmatic and ambitious as Johnson, equally skilled in the art of accumulating power or throwing a sharp elbow. This is the story of how one of the most competent White House staffs in American history–serving one of the most complicated presidents ever to occupy the Oval Office–fundamentally changed everyday life for millions of citizens and forged a legacy of compassionate and interventionist government. (publ.)

Description: This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and something we should all just “get over”" The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, “slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.” (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 1 Apr. 2018 p. 8; Economist 14 Apr. 2018 p. 77.
Description: An account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives. After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. [This book] recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 13 Nov. 2017 p. 66
Description: Paired poems about topics including family dinners, sports, recess, and much more. This relatable collection explores different experiences of race in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 6 Dec. 2018 p. 46.
Description: This book explores the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, the author traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 27 Apr. 2018 p. 3.
Description: Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 22 Feb. 2018 p. 27
Description: Imagine being born into a world where everything about you–the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth–designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving everything you know and finding some way to survive, in the name of your family and your people. Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda–the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving, Cockroaches is a window onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Inyenzi, ou, Les Cafards (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

Reviewed: CHE 13 Oct. 2017 (new books)
Description: West Charlotte opened in 1938 as a segregated school that embodied the aspirations of the growing African American population of Charlotte, North Carolina. In the 1970s, when Charlotte began court-ordered busing, black and white families made West Charlotte the celebrated flagship of the most integrated major school system in the nation. But as the twentieth century neared its close and a new court order eliminated race-based busing, Charlotte schools resegregated along lines of class as well as race. West Charlotte became the city's poorest, lowest-performing high school--a striking reminder of the people and places that Charlotte's rapid growth had left behind. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 June 2017 p. 15; Choice Sep. 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Essential; Top 75 titles recommended for community college libraries); CHE 4 Aug. 2017 p. B2; Top 10 Books of 2017 (PW 30 Oct. 2017 p. 22; NYRB 22 Feb. 2018 p. 19; TLS 13 July 2018 p. 9.
Description: Challenges the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation – that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation – the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments – that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 19 Jan. 2017 p. 54.
Description: In this book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like “domestic insurrectionists” and “merciless savages,” the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: PW 17 Apr. 2017 p. 42
Description: A “…righteous and revelatory collection of sonnets that illuminate the liminal zones between the urban and suburban, blackness and whiteness, wealth and struggle, and much more. …” (PW)

Reviewed: CHE 20 Apr. 2018 (New Books)
Description: The special legal status of Native Americans and the highly complex jurisdictional issues resulting from colonial ideologies have become deeply embedded into federal law and policy. Nevertheless, Indigenous people in the United States are often invisible in discussions of criminal and social justice. … The contributors to this volume reflect on issues in three key areas: crime, social justice, and community responses to crime and justice issues. Topics include stalking, involuntary sterilization of Indigenous women, border-town violence, Indian gaming, child welfare, and juvenile justice. These issues are all rooted in colonization; however, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous communities are finding their own solutions for social justice, sovereignty, and self-determination. Thanks to its focus on community responses that exemplify Indigenous resilience, persistence, and innovation, this volume will be valuable to those on the ground working with Indigenous communities in public and legal arenas, as well as scholars and students. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In this book, Tera Agyepong explores the vital role children played in the construction of ideas of criminality in early twentieth century Chicago. For African American children, youthfulness–far from being a marker of purity or innocence–was a factor in subjecting them to particular institutional, social, and economic vulnerabilities at the hands of the juvenile justice system. At a moment when blackness was becoming a marker of criminality, their race overrode the potential protections their status as children could have provided them. (publ.)

Note: Local author.
Description: Many accounts were given about the racism. The federal government looked at city records. They found the secret. Chicago blacks were removed from vouchers. They called it "The Purge."

Description: In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an in-human system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. This volume focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system. It provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore the family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived, but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Essential; Recommended for community college libraries); CHE 6 Apr. 2018 (new books).
Description: Offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. (publ.)

Description: Offers an account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich, give corporations control over financial markets, and aggressively curtail social services. White voters, convinced by powerful interests that minorities are their true enemies, fail to see the connection between the political agendas they support and the surging wealth inequality that takes an increasing toll on their lives. (publ.)

Description: Jasmine Gibson explores myriad intersectional identities in relation to The State, disease, love, sex, failure, and triumph. Speaking to those who feel disillusioned by both radical and banal spaces and inspired/informed by moments of political crisis: Hurricane Katrina, The Jena Six, the extrajudicial executions of Black people, and the periods of insurgency that erupted in response, this book acts as a synthesis of political life and poetic form. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 9 Dec. 2016
Description: Suburban high school study of female-centered bullying.

Reviewed: PW 18 Nov. 2019 p. 65; NYT/BR 1 Mar. 2020 p. 13.
Description: The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green’s famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression. Enlivened by Sorin’s personal history, this book opens an entirely new view onto the African American experience, and shows why travel was so central to the Civil Rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Top 75 books essential for community college libraries.
Description: Physician Jonathan M. Metzl’s quest to understand the health implications of “backlash governance” leads him across America’s heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies’ costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 16 Dec. 2018 p. 26.
Description: Award-winning poet Nina Puro’s debut collection. “For all her attention to the hot, colorful self, Puro … understands the social and structural elements–rigid gender roles, geographic isolation, economic wrongs–that brought her troubled figures to this pass…” (NYT). She currently is a social worker in Brooklyn, NY.

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin’s egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2018 p. 119.
Description: Whether subtle or blatant, racially biased images and narratives erase minorities, perpetuate stereotypes, and keep alive practices of discrimination and marginalization. Even in the 21st century, the American film industry is not "color blind," evidenced by films such as Babel (2006), A Better Life (2011), and 12 Years a Slave (2013). The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Film documents one facet of racism in the film industry, wherein historically underrepresented peoples are misrepresented--through a lack of roles for actors of color, stereotyping, negative associations, and an absence of rich, nuanced characters. Offering insights and analysis from over seventy scholars, critics, and activists, the volume highlights issues such as: Hollywood's diversity crisis; White Savior films; Magic Negro tropes; & The disconnect between screen images and lived realities of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians. (publ.)

Description: This book questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the twentieth century–one in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, one in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, and one in Jasper, Texas, in 1998–to see how Americans developed two distinct ways of thinking and talking about this act before and after the 1930s. One way takes seriously the legal and moral concept of complicity as a way to understand the dynamics of a lynching; this way of thinking can give us new perceptions into the meaning of mobs and the lynching photographs in which we find them. Another way, which developed in the 1940s and continues to influence us today, uses a strategy of denial to claim that lynchings have ended. Rushdy examines how the denial of lynching emerged and developed, providing insight into how and why we talk about lynching the way we do at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, he forces us to confront our responsibilities as American citizens and as human beings. (publ.)

Description: Flint's water supply tainted with lead. Chicago's toxic donut. Louisiana's cancer alley. Corporate waste poisoning developing nations. These are all examples of environmental racism. Readers of this compelling anthology will be awakened to many examples of poor and minority communities that suffer physically, emotionally, and financially from living in a toxic environment. With no political clout and few available resources, these victims find themselves abandoned by the environmental movement and bullied by environmental policies. The burgeoning environmental justice movement argues that environmental protection is a basic right. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 29 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Provides a overview of the American juvenile justice systems development and change over the past century. Noted law professor and criminologist Barry C. Feld places special emphasis on changes over the last 25 years, the ascendance of get tough crime policies, and the more recent Supreme Court recognition that children are different. …Ultimately, Feld argues, providing justice for children requires structural changes to reduce social and economic inequality concentrated poverty in segregated urban areas, that disproportionately expose children of color to juvenile courts punitive policies. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 15 Jan. 2018 p. 52
Description: The vast majority of the law enforcement officers in this country perform their very difficult jobs with respect for their communities and in compliance with the law. Even so, there have been incidents in which this was not the case. Police brutality and misconduct has been under the microscope for the last several years, and Loretta Prater brings these issues to light through research reports and numerous examples of cases, including the personal case of her son. On January 2, 2004, Leslie Vaughn Prater, Loretta Prater’s unarmed son, was a homicide victim in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His death resulted from an altercation with four police officers. This book is the account of an African American family’s personal experience with police brutality and misconduct, the behind the scene dynamics, as well as the personal emotional trauma experienced by victims’ families. (publ.)

Description: Exploring white privilege is an enterprise few of us who identify as white have attempted. White privilege is a foreign territory to us, although an unpleasantly familiar territory to people of color. At first the exploration can seem threatening, frightening and uncomfortable because, like any exploration, it can shatter the way we look at the world and how we understand ourselves. This book is, in part, a personal exploration of the author’s white privilege and how he sought to transcend it. It is also a sociological analysis of white privilege, drawing upon key social science literature. The book is an invaluable tool for personal and group explorations of racial privilege as well as other forms of privilege, including gender. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Highly recommended.
Description: In 1920, 14 percent of all land-owning US farmers were black. Today less than 2 percent of farms are controlled by black people–a loss of over 14 mil-lion acres and the result of discrimination and dispossession. While farm management is among the whitest of professions, farm labor is predominantly brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in “food apartheid” neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness. The system is built on stolen land and stolen labor and needs a redesign. This book is the first comprehensive “how to” guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. … Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described–from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement. The technical information is designed for farmers and gardeners with beginning to intermediate experience. For those with more experience, the book provides a fresh lens on practices that may have been taken for granted as a historical or strictly European. Black ancestors and contemporaries have always been leaders–and continue to lead–in the sustainable agriculture and food justice movements. It is time for all of us to listen. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Mar. 2019 p. 75.
Description: There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 10 Nov. 2019 p. 26.
Description: August Wilson (1945–2005) was a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning play-wright who had a particular talent for capturing the authentic, everyday voice of Black Americans. As a child, he read off soup cans and cereal boxes, and when his mother brought him to the library, his whole world opened up. After facing intense prejudice at school from both students and some teachers, August dropped out. However, he continued reading and educating himself independently. He felt that if he could read about it, then he could teach himself anything and accomplish anything. Like many of his plays, this book is told in two acts, revealing how Wilson grew up to be one of the most influential American playwrights. The book includes an author’s note, a timeline of August Wilson’s life, a list of Wilson’s plays, and a bibliography. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community’s long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city’s courtrooms. Taylor challenges the belief that police reform is born out of improved relations between communities and the authorities arguing that the only real solution is radically reducing the police domination of New York's black citizens. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 22
Description: In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwin's words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generation's most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The book is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwin's essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of “moral suasion” and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an anti-slavery war. In this book, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the burgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. (publ.)

Review: TLS 22 Mar. 2019 p. 12.
Description: The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who be came the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, often to large crowds, using his own story to condemn slavery. He broke with Garrison to become a political abolitionist, a Republican, and eventually a Lincoln supporter. By the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Douglass became the most famed and widely traveled orator in the nation. (publ.)

Reviewed: 9 July 2018 p. 66.
Description: A treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical debut story collection that looks at what it’s like to be young and black in America. By placing ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, Adjei-Brenyah reveals the violence, injustice, and painful absurdities that black men and women contend with every day in this country. These stories tackle urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and explore the many ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,” Adjei-Brenyah gives us an unforgettable reckoning of the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,” we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King” show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all. Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, this book confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 13 Aug. 2017 (book review); LJ December 2017 p. 22 (Best Books 2017)
Description: When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 Mar. 2018 p. 106; NYRB 22 Nov. 2018 p. 28; Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education. The struggle to desegregate America’s schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In this book, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 97(5) Sept./Oct. 2018 p. 224.
Description: Discusses the new political climate in Europe and the United States where xenophobia and racism have voted Britain out of the EU and catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency. Opportunistic politicians have exploited the economic crisis, terrorist attacks, and an unprecedented influx of refugees to bring hateful and reactionary views from the margins of political discourse into the mainstream. Openly xenophobic ideas are becoming state policy. How did we get here? Polakow-Suransky chronicles how the backlash against refugees and immigrants has reshaped our political landscape. He argues that the greatest threat comes not from outside, but from within, and established democracies are at risk of betraying their core values and falling apart. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 5 May 2017 (new books); Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Essential; Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the US Army killed over two hundred Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek.

Review: LJ Winter 2018 p. 89.
Description: Presents essays by first- and second-generation immigrant writers on the realities of immigration, multiculturalism, and marginalization in an increasingly divided America. From Trump’s proposed border wall and travel ban to the marching of White Supremacists in Charlottesville, America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as “lively and vital,” editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 94; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 97; NYT/BR 10 Mar. 2019 p. 1.
Description: In the early 1970s, three African-American men–Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson–were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. The prosecution’s case, which resulted in a combined 106 years in prison for the three men, rested on the more-than-questionable testimony of a pre-teen, Ed Vernon. The actual murderer was never found. Almost four decades later, Vernon recanted his testimony, and Wiley, Kwame, and Rickey were released. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial. Interweaving the dramatic details of the case with Cleveland's history–one that, to this day, is fraught with systemic discrimination and racial tension–Swenson reveals how this outrage occurred and why. This is a work of astonishing empathy and insight: an immersive exploration of race in America, the struggling Midwest, and how lost lives can be recovered. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 82.
Description: Comprising personal accounts from an intensely consequential chapter in our country's history, [this book] tells the story of American slavery from its origins in Africa to its abolition with the end of the Civil War. In this new work, Noel Rae integrates firsthand accounts into a narrative history that brings the reader face to face with slavery's everyday reality, expertly weaving together narratives that span hundreds of years. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a “Great Uprising.” Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood. By focusing on three specific cities as case studies–Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania–Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this “Great Uprising” are still predominant in American culture today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 55; PW 25 Mar. 2019 p. 84; NYT/BR 7 July 2019 p. 14; NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 53.
Description: A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, this tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers–many of them progressives–who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books recommended as essential for community college libraries.
Description: In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 cities across the U.S., the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, was formed. As part of its work, the Commission employed social scientists to research the root causes of the disturbances, including the role that law enforcement played. Chief among its research projects was a study of 23 American cities, headed by social psychologist Robert Shellow. Shellow’s social scientists worked from the vast material brought back by teams of Commission investigators who fanned out across those cities, conducting interviews and gathering data. An early draft of the scientists’ analysis was delivered on November 22, 1967. Their report, titled “The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967,” provoked the Commission's staff by uncovering political causes for the unrest; the team of researchers was fired, and the controversial report remained buried at the LBJ Presidential Library until now. The first publication of the “Harvest” report half a century later reveals that many of the issues it describes are still with us, including how cities might more effectively and humanely react to groups and communities in protest. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 32 (Notable Children’s Books of 2017).
Description: Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. (publ.)

Description: “Hate speech” censorship proponents stress the potential harms such speech might further: discrimination, violence, and psychic injuries. However, there has been little analysis of whether censorship effectively counters the feared injuries. Citing evidence from many countries, this book shows that “hate speech” laws are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Their inevitably vague terms invest enforcing officials with broad discretion, and predictably, regular targets are minority views and speakers. Therefore, prominent social justice advocates in the U.S. and beyond maintain that the best way to resist hate and promote equality is not censorship, but rather, vigorous “counterspeech” and activism. … We hear too many incorrect assertions that “hate speech”–which has no generally accepted definition–is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm. Yet, government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials formerly wielded such broad censorship power, they suppressed dissident speech, including equal rights advocacy. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 94.
Description: America is a land in which extremism no longer belongs to the country’s shadowy fringes, but comfortably exists in the national mainstream. That is the alarming conclusion by intelligence analyst Daryl Johnson, an expert on domestic extremism with more than twenty-five years of experience tracking radicalized groups for the US government. In this book, Johnson dissects the rapidly expanding forms of American hatred and radicalization, including white nationalists, antigovernment militias, antifascists (Antifa), militant black nationalists, and extremist Islamic groups. The author develops a concise model that explains how extremists on both the far right and the far left use the same techniques to recruit and radicalize individuals into violent offenders. He also examines the political forces that fuel this threat and have kept the US government from properly identifying and developing countermeasures to deal with it, including a disproportional emphasis on Islamic terrorism. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 17 Apr. 2017 p. 59
Description: In December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's Black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical Black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around. Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Death Blossoms, Live from Death Row, All Things Censored, and Writing on the Wall. (publ.)

Reviewed: JRB 9(4) Winter 2019 p. 17 (reviewer)
Description: The Third Reich's legacy is in flux. For much of the post-war period, the Nazi era has been viewed moralistically as an exceptional period of history intrinsically different from all others. Since the turn of the millennium, however, this view has been challenged by a powerful wave of normalization. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld charts this important international trend by examining the shifting representation of the Nazi past in contemporary western intellectual and cultural life. Focusing on works of historical scholarship, popular novels, counterfactual histories, feature films, and Internet websites, he identifies notable changes in the depiction of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the figure of Adolf Hitler himself. By exploring the origins of these works and assessing the controversies they have sparked in the United States and Europe, this book offers a fascinating and timely analysis of the shifting status of the Nazi past in western memory. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Apr 2017 vol. 54 no. 8 (essential, Top 75 Selection for Community Colleges); TLS 10 Mar. 2017 p. 47; NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 38
Description: Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 110; NYT/BR 15 Apr. 2018 p. 21.
Description: Tells the story of America’s public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly through the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)
Contents: (1) Harriet Beecher Stowe and the “Book That Made This Great War”; (2) The American Book Trade and the Civil War; (3) The Transatlantic History of Civil War Literature; (4) The “American Renaissance” after the American Civil War; (5) The Realists’ Civil War; (6) Dépôt Culture: The Civil War and Periodical Fiction; (7) Imitation and Resistance in Civil War Poetry and Song; (8) Children’s Literature; (9) Writing Lives: Civil War Diaries; (10) Civil War Memoir; (11) Civil War Narrative History; (12) Walt Whitman; (13) War and the Art of Writing: Emily Dickinson’s Relational Aesthetics; (14) Herman Melville and the Civilian Author; (15) Looking at Lincoln; (16) Frederick Douglass, Violence, and Abraham Lincoln; (17) Mary Boykin Chesnut: Epic and Minature; (18) Mark Twain; (19) Replay : William Faulkner and the Civil War; (20) Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War; (21) Natasha Trethewey’s Civil War; (22) Afterword: Archiving the War.

Reviewed: Choice (Aug 2019 vol. 56 no. 12); Essential; Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Maryann Erigha tells the story of inequality, looking at the practices and biases that limit the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities. She examines over 1,300 contemporary films, specifically focusing on directors, to show the key elements at work in maintaining “the Hollywood Jim Crow.” Unlike the Jim Crow era where ideas about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for segregation, Hollywood’s version tries to use economic and cultural explanations to justify the under-representation and stigmatization of Black filmmakers. Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood's racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it. Erigha questions the notion that increased representation of African Americans behind the camera is the sole answer to the racial inequality gap. Instead, she suggests focusing on the obstacles to integration for African American film directors. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/M 13 Jan. 2018 p. 14 (excerpt).
Description: In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption. In these stories, Jemisin sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Aug. 2019 p. 24 (cited); PW 24 Feb. 2020 p. 62.
Description: Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. But the appeal to science to strengthen racist ideologies is on the rise–and increasingly part of the public discourse on politics, migration, education, sport and intelligence. Stereotypes and myths about race are expressed not just by overt racists, but also by well-intentioned people whose experience and cultural baggage steer them towards views that are not supported by the modern study of human genetics. Even some scientists are uncomfortable expressing opinions deriving from their research where it relates to race. Yet, if understood correctly, science and history can be powerful allies against racism, granting the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be. This is a vital manifesto for a twenty-first century understanding of human evolution and variation, and a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify bigotry. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 93; NYT/BR 29 Sept. 2019 p. 9; NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019"); PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 30 (Best Books 2019); TLS 7 Feb. 2020 p. 27.
Description: Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America—but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In this book, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. He weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Sept. 2018 p. 70.
Description: Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as white supremacy and racial injustice are more visible than ever before. Combining no-holds-barred social critique, humorous personal anecdotes, and analysis of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on systemic racism, sociologist Crystal M. Fleming provides a fresh, accessible, and irreverent take on everything that's wrong with our “national conversation about race.” Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance–and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 93; LJ Mar. 2019 p. 140.
Description: This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice–and ideas for how each of us can contribute. Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you’re Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It’s a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future. (publ.)

Reviewed: WLT Summer 2019 p. 89.
Description: Based on true events, a story of courage, forgiveness, love, and freedom in pre-colonial Ghana, told through the eyes of two women born to vastly different fates. Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court. These two women’s lives converge as infighting among Wurche’s people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century. Through the experiences of Aminah and Wurche, Attah offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of every-day people. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 27 April 2018 p. 3
Description: On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man died in New York City after a police officer put him in what has been described as a chokehold during an arrest for selling loosies, or single cigarettes. The final moments of his life were captured on video and seen by millions, sparking an international series of protests that built into the transformative Black Lives Matter movement. Matt Taibbi ... tells the full story of the man who inspired a movement–neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family. Featuring ... vignettes of life on the street, this ... narrative of urban America is a ... scathing indictment of law enforcement in the twenty-first century. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 Mar. 2018 p. 110; LJ 15 Apr. 2018 p. 82; PW 15 Oct. 2018 p. 56
Description: Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct. 2017 vol. 55 no. 2 (Highly Recommend-ed)
Description: Offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to deemphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jun. 2019 vol. 56 no. 10) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: This book will significantly benefit those interested in learning more about diversity and inclusion at community colleges and will provide insight into strategic diversity leadership. It provides an in-depth view of the roles and responsibilities of the chief diversity officer, diversity strategic planning, and examines the various roles of diversity leaders at community colleges.
Note: Published in partnership with the American Association of Community Colleges.

Reviewed: CHE 13 Jan. 2016
Description: This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Nov. 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (Highly Recommended; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: An edited collection that examines the US Army’s role and place in progressive social change through the lens of the military experience of African Americans, women, and gays since World War II. By making this long overdue comparison, the editors argue this anthology demonstrates how the challenges launched against the racial, gender, and sexual status quo in the years after World War II transformed overarching ideas about power, citizenship, and America’s role in the world. … Sheds new light on a broad range of issues that affected civilian society, such as affirmative action, integration, marriage laws, and sexual harassment. (publ.)

Holdings: Copies at Calmar & Peosta. 2nd copy will be added to Peosta. Donated as part of 2018 MLK event speaker Patti Miller, Mon Jan 15, 2018 10am – 11:20am. URL: https://www.nicc.edu/aboutnicc/news/mlk-day-2018.html
Description: Gives firsthand accounts of the experiences of six Iowa natives who, though personally unfamiliar with racial issues, felt compelled to volunteer that summer. Viewers will hear their stories as they share their motivations, fears, triumphs and life altering events that took place during that historic summer 50 years ago.

Reviewed: Choice Nov. 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (Essential; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Author Eric Love shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 6 Jan. 2019 p. SR7 (author op/ed).
Description: In the last few decades, any hope of economic progress for black Americans has been slowly and steadily undermined. This quiet crisis was only exacerbated by the recession, which cut black households’ wealth by over 30 percent. Black millennials watched their parents try to play by the rules, buying homes and aspiring to the trappings of middle-class life, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. Now, in the post-Obama era, young black Americans face a critical turning point, as they try to realize dreams too long deferred ... Allen interweaves reflections on defining moments, from Hurricane Katrina to the murder of Michael Brown to the election of Donald Trump. Together, the lives and reflections in these pages offer a portrait of a generation on the brink, tracing their efforts to build their own futures and write their own history. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A revealing portrait of Richard Oakes, the brilliant, charismatic Native American leader who was instrumental in the takeovers of Alcatraz, Fort Lawton, and Pit River and whose assassination in 1972 galvanized the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, DC. The life of this pivotal Akwesasne Mohawk activist is explored in an important new biography based on extensive archival research and key interviews with activists and family members. Historian Kent Blansett offers a transformative and new perspective on the Red Power movement of the turbulent 1960s and the dynamic figure who helped to organize and champion it, telling the full story of Oakes’s life, his fight for Native American self-determination, and his tragic, untimely death. This invaluable history chronicles the mid-twentieth century rise of Intertribalism, Indian Cities, and a national political awakening that continues to shape Indigenous politics and activism to this day. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (1 May 2017; “All Things Considered”: After Arkansas Executions, Lawyer Criticizes Use Of Capital Punishment) (21 Aug. 2015; “Fresh Air”: One Lawyer's Fight For Young Blacks And Just Mercy) (30 July 2016; “What College Freshmen are Reading”)
Description: The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.

Reviewed: LJ Feb. 2019 p. 105.
Description: Shortly before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a radical redistribution of economic and political power to transform the whole of society. In 1967, he envisioned and designed the Poor People’s Campaign, an interracial effort that was carried out after his death. This campaign brought together impoverished Americans of all races to demand better wages, better jobs, better homes, and better education. Sylvie Laurent explores this overlooked and obscured episode of the late civil rights movement, deepening our understanding of King’s commitment to social justice and also of the long-term trajectory of the civil rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 16 Dec. 2019 p. 105.
Description: The untold story of the Harvard class of ’63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirma-tive action. In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited eighteen “Negro” boys as an experiment, an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, began to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant. Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these young men broke new ground. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against injustice, had lunch with Malcolm X, experienced heartbreak and the racism of academia, and joined with their African national classmates to fight for the right to form an ex-clusive Black students’ group. Part journey into personal history, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the civil rights movement, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 61; PW 24 Sept. 2018 p. 97.
Description: In August 1955, the fourteen-year-old Chicago boy supposedly flirted with a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, who worked behind the counter of a country store, while visiting family in Mississippi. Three days later, his mangled body was recovered in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down by a cotton-gin fan. Till’s killers, Bryant’s husband and his half-brother, were eventually acquitted on technicalities by an all-white jury despite overwhelming evidence. It seemed another case of Southern justice. Then details of what had happened to Till became public, which they did in part because Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted that his casket remain open during his funeral. In 2005, fifty years after the murder, the FBI reopened the case. New papers and testimony have come to light, and several participants, including Till’s mother, have published autobiographies. Using this new evidence and a broadened historical context, Elliott J. Gorn delves more fully than anyone has into how and why the story of Emmett Till still resonates, and always will. (publ.)

Description: In spite of America’s identity as a liberal democracy, the vile act of lynching happened frequently in the Southern United States over the course of the nation’s history. Indeed, lynchings were very public events, and were even advertised in newspapers, begging the question of how such brazen disregard for the law could have occurred so freely and openly. This book seeks to explain the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the American liberal regime and the illiberal act of lynching. Drawing on legal cases, congressional documents, presidential correspondence, and newspaper reports, Daniel Kato explores the federal government's pattern of nonintervention regarding lynchings of African Americans from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. Although popular belief holds that the federal government was unable to address racial violence in the South, this book argues that the actions and decisions of the federal government from the 1870s through the 1960s reveal that federal inaction was not primarily a consequence of institutional or legal incapacities, but rather a decision that was supported and maintained by all three branches of government. Inaction stemmed from the decision not to intervene, not from the powerlessness of the federal government. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 17 Mar. 2017 (new books)
Description: When Lincoln took office, in March 1861, the national government had no power to touch slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln understood this, and said as much in his first inaugural address, noting: 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.' " How, then, asks Paul Finkelman in the introduction to Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation, did Lincoln–who personally hated slavery–lead the nation through the Civil War to January 1865, when Congress passed the constitutional amendment that ended slavery outright? The essays in this book examine the route Lincoln took to achieve emancipation and how it is remembered both in the United States and abroad. (publ.)

Description: Argues that literary analysis can enhance our historical understanding of race and Reconstruction. The standard view that Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 is a retrospective construction. Works of literature provide the perspective of those who continued to see possibilities for its renewal well past 1877. … Literature’s political allegories allow us to recreate debates rather than view the end of Reconstruction as a foregone conclusion. Because many of the issues raised by Reconstruction remain unresolved, those debates continue into the present. Chapters treat how the racial issues raised by Reconstruction are interwoven with debates over state v. national authority, efforts to combat terrorism (the KKK), the paternalism of welfare, economic expansion, and the question of who should rightly inherit the nation’s past. Thomas examines authors who opposed Reconstruction, authors who supported it, and authors who struggled with mixed feelings. (publ.)
Contents: Introduction: not in plain black and white – 1. Reconciliation and reunion: clasping hands over the bloody chasm – 2. Federalism: thinking nationally, acting locally – 3. The Ku Klux Klan: the necessity of extreme measures – 4. Of mules and men: African American manhood and the paradox of paternalism – 5. Ruiz de Burton and railroads: the westward course of reconstruction – 6. Working with the heritage of the Old South – 7. Inheriting a shadow and a dream.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 16 Apr. 2017 p. 1; LRB 4 May 2017 p. 5; PW 30 Oct. 2017 (Best Books of 2017); NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 24 (100 Notable Books 2017); NYT/BR 10 Dec. 2017 p. 10 (10 Best Books of 2017).
Description: Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics–and their impact on people of color–are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime. As Forman shows, the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office around the country amid a surge in crime. Many came to believe that tough measures–such as stringent drug and gun laws and "pretext traffic stops" in poor African American neighborhoods–were needed to secure a stable future for black communities. Some politicians and activists saw criminals as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of black America. Others supported harsh measures more reluctantly, believing they had no other choice in the face of a public safety emergency. Drawing on his experience as a public defender and focusing on Washington, D.C., Forman writes with compassion for individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas–from the young men and women he defended to officials struggling to cope with an impossible situation. The result is an original view of our justice system as well as a moving portrait of the human beings caught in its coils. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 9 Dec. 2016 p. 3
Description: Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process–a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. Berlin teases out the distinct characteristics of emancipation, weaving them into a larger narrative of the meaning of American freedom. The most important factor was the will to survive and the enduring resistance of enslaved black people themselves. In striving for emancipation, they were also the first to raise the crucial question of their future status. If they were no longer slaves, what would they be? African Americans provided the answer, drawing on ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and precepts of evangelical Christianity. Freedom was their inalienable right in a post-slavery society, for nothing seemed more natural to people of color than the idea that all Americans should be equal. African Americans were not naive about the price of their idealism. Just as slavery was an institution initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence. Freedom could be achieved only through generations of long and brutal struggle. (publ.)
Holdings: Copy at Calmar.

Reviewed: CHE 21 Apr. 2017 (new books); NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 29 (new acad. books)
Description: Examines the appeal of mass marches for turn-of-the-millennium Americans.

Reviewed: NYT 4 June 2017 p. SR3 (author op/ed)
Description: When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case--the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America's original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of “nonwhite blood” merited exclusion from full citizenship. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR “All Things Considered” (11 Feb. 2019)
Description: Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. (publ.) “The Magical Negro” is the trope in literature and movies where a black character appears in a plot solely to help a white character–and then vanishes. Think Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance or Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. In her new book of poems, Morgan Parker strives to reclaim the term. (NPR)

Description: What happens when Marvin wants to sit on the stool at a lunch counter in Knoxville, Tennessee, which has a sign taped on it stating “whites only”? When his family joins a protest downtown about, Marvin becomes aware of the civil rights struggle, and the more basic cause of freedom. The book effectually captures the stress and determination of black citizens seeking to break down racial barriers.

Reviewed: PW 24 Feb. 2020 p. 63.
Description: As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. His commitment to reforming the justice system and making America a more equitable place has brought challenges and triumphs, soaring victories and crushing defeats. Throughout his wide-ranging activism, King’s commentary remains rooted in both exhaustive research and abundant passion. He offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Apr. 2018 vol. 55 no. 8 (top 75 books recommended for community college libraries).
Description: Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln’s defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas’s attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln’s framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country’s founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery’s destruction but triggered the Civil War. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 96(5) Sept./Oct. 2017 p. 180
Description: Started in the wake of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and uncompromising campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that “Black Lives Matter” comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity--and not just equal rights--of black people. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 15 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: During the 2016 election, a new term entered the mainstream American political lexicon: “alt-right,” short for “alternative right.” Despite the innocuous name, the alt-right is a white-nationalist movement. Yet it differs from earlier racist groups: it is youthful and tech savvy, obsessed with provocation and trolling, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous. And it was energized by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Hawley explains the movement’s origins, evolution, methods, and core belief in white-identity politics. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 9 Oct. 2017 p. 65
Description: A harrowing picture biography of civil-rights activist and Grammy Award-winning South African singer Miriam Makeba.

Reviewed: PW 13 Nov. 2017 p. 67; NYT/BR 25 Mar. 2018 p. 22.
Description: Long before she was one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals was a warrior. Frustrated by the laws that kept African-Americans separate but very much unequal to whites, she had questions. Why couldn’t she drink from a “whites only” fountain? Why couldn’t she feel safe beyond home–or even within the walls of church? Adults all told her: Hold your tongue. Be patient. Know your place. But Beals had the heart of a fighter–and the knowledge that her true place was a free one. Combined with emotive drawings and photos, this memoir paints a vivid picture of Beals’ powerful early journey on the road to becoming a champion for equal rights, an acclaimed journalist, a best-selling author, and the recipient of this country’s highest recognition, the Congressional Gold Medal. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: This biography of Marcus Garvey documents the forging of his remarkable vision of pan-Africanism and highlights his organizational skills in framing a response to the radical global popular upsurge following the First World War. Central to Garvey’s response was the development of organizations under the umbrella of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which garnered the transnational support of several million members and sympathizers and challenged white supremacist practices and ideas. Garvey established the ideological pillars of twentieth-century pan-Africanism in promoting self-determination and self-reliance for Africa's independence. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 23 June 2017 (new books)
Description: Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Sept. 2017 p. 76.
Description: From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation's past. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 29 June 2017 p. 21
Description: A unique and extraordinary historical narrative of generations of a Black family with roots in slavery and in the South. This family won their freedom with emancipation but, instead of fleeing the poverty and oppression of the White plantation, decided to stay on the homeland of their White masters and then to purchase it for themselves within a decade. In a true counterpoint to the predominant tale of the Black exodus north in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these African Americans chose to hold onto the land that they had rightfully inherited and to risk all to keep it in the ensuing decades. Sydney Nathans, in his deep research into family and plantation papers and archives, as well as in invaluable oral interviews, has uncovered a slice of history that would otherwise have remained unknown. (publ.)

Description: The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In this book, Michael E. Staub investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 17 Aug. 2018 p. 30.
Description: Author Siddhartha Kara has documented the realities of human trafficking and forced labor in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing system that strips people of their dignity for the sake of profit–and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In this book, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the scope of slavery and offer a concrete path to its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than sixty countries around the globe–including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors–Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Enslavement offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, he unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the power-less. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Dec. 2017 p. 120; LJ Dec. 2017 p. 108; NYT 25 Jan. 2018 p. C1
Description: Award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects the national myth-making of American civil rights, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 4 Feb. 2018 p. SR10 (author op/ed); LJ Jan. 2018 p. 114; Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: They are often seen in photos of crowds in the mid-century South–white women shooting down blacks with looks of pure hatred. Yet it is the male white supremacists who have been the focus of the literature on white resistance to Civil Rights. This groundbreaking first book recovers the daily workers who upheld the system of segregation and Jim Crow for so long–white women. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (2/18/2018)
Description: In crafted, well-honed prose, Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker, whose homage to the sugar trade Sugar Sphinx electrified American audiences. This book is a moving meditation documenting the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In the tradition of Paul Gilroy, it is a cri de coeur for the significance of politically bold–even dangerous–art to all people and nations. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Jan. 2018 p. 55
Description: One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally at-tacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham’s black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jenny Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 9 Feb. 2018 (new books)
Description: Swirling in the midst of the resurgence of neo-Nazi demonstrations, hate speech, and acts of domestic terrorism are uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech. The United States stands apart from many other countries in that citizens have the power to say virtually anything without legal repercussions. But, in the case of white supremacy, does the First Amendment demand that we defend Nazis? In this book, legal experts Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argue that it should not. Updated to consider the white supremacy demonstrations and counter-protests in Charlottesville and debates about hate speech on campus and on the internet, the book offers a concise argument against total, unchecked freedom of speech. Delgado and Stefancic instead call for a system of free speech that takes into account the harms that hate speech can inflict upon disempowered, marginalized people. They examine the prevailing arguments against regulating speech, and show that they all have answers. They also show how limiting free speech would work in a legal framework and offer suggestions for activist lawyers and judges interested in approaching the hate speech controversy intelligently. As citizens are confronting free speech in contention with equal dignity, access, and respect, the authors put aside clichés that clutter First Amendment thinking, and presents a nuanced position that recognizes the needs of our increasingly diverse society. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 8 July 2018 p. 12; Economist 30 June 2018 p. 72; TLS 26 Oct. 2018.
Description: At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering from guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men–including half of the ten boys in his own family–end up in the criminal justice system. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Oct. 2019 p. 54.
Description: At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in an adopted family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And he learned that his mother had been pleading for his safe return to her since his birth. Here Sissay recounts his life story. It is a story of neglect and determination. Misfortune and hope. Cruelty and beauty. Sissay reflects on adoption, self-expression and Britishness, and in doing so explores the institutional care system, race, family and the meaning of home. Written with all the lyricism and power you would expect from one of the nation’s best-loved voices, this moving, frank and timely memoir is the result of a life spent asking questions, and a celebration of the redemptive power of creativity. (publ.)

Description: This volume is devoted to the NFL national anthem protests, which have triggered both fierce condemnation and spirited defenses since August 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the anthem to bring attention to the issues of social injustice and police brutality. NFL National Anthem Protests not only surveys the events that led to Kaepernick’s decision but also traces the fallout from that choice–the decision by other players to join him, the angry response from some NFL fans and President Trump himself, and the frantic efforts of the league to keep the controversy from consuming the NFL. The book also uses those events and responses as a vehicle for deeper examinations of all of the issues they have raised, including the nature of peaceful protest, the place of the flag in American life, the constitutional parameters of free speech, and the facts about police brutality and racial discrimination in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 Jan. 2018. p. 33
Description: Okey Ndibe’s funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential–but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency–African Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe’s relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the US, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice-versa); and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American. (publ.)

Reviewed: WLT Summer 2019 p. 101.
Description: Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Busby’s Daughters of Africa was published to international acclaim and hailed as an extraordinary body of achievement …a vital document of lost history (Sunday Times) and the ultimate reference guide (Washington Post). This anthology continues that tradition for a new generation. It brings together fresh and vibrant voices that have emerged from across the globe in the past two decades, from Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the United States. Key figures, including Margo Jefferson, Nawal El Saadawi, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith, join popular contemporaries such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Taiye Selasi, and Chinelo Okparanta in celebrating the heritage that unites them. Each of the pieces in this remarkable collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honors the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles female writers of color face as they negotiate issues of race, gender, and class and address vital matters of independence, freedom, and oppression. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 26 Feb. 2017 p. 17; LRB 4 May 2017 p. 5
Note: “…This best seller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter. …” (NYT); “…The New Jim Crow has exerted an influence enjoyed by few other works of social science in America, transforming the way many Americans, of all races, understand their society. …” (LRB)

Reviewed: PW 27 Nov. 2017 p. 26 (author profile); NYT/BR 25 Feb. 2018 p. 16.
Description: The definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 97(6) Nov./Dec. 2018 p. 213; NYRB 6 JUne 2019 p. 45.
Description: Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of racial slavery. Some historians have charged that slave-holders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation’s founding. Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers’ work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery’s legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 4 Apr. 2017 p. 7
Description: The book begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa (Iowa City), and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.

Holdings: Copy at Calmar; 2nd copy ordered for Peosta. Call no. 306.362 Res.
Note: Winner of Bancroft Prize in American History & Diplomacy 2017; National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction 2016.
Description: Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in this book, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians–as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 1 Mar. 2020 p. 13.
Description: The first book to explore the historical role and residual impact of the Green Book, a travel guide for black motorists. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book was hailed as the “black travel guide to America.” At that time, it was very dangerous and difficult for African-Americans to travel because black travelers couldn’t eat, sleep, or buy gas at most white-owned businesses. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for black travelers. It was a resourceful and innovative solution to a horrific problem. It took courage to be listed in the Green Book, and Overground Railroad celebrates the stories of those who put their names in the book and stood up against segregation. It shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 16 Dec. 2019 p. 106.
Description: School choice, largely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The rhetoric of school choice, however, resembles that of segregationists who closed public schools and funded private institutions to block African American students from integrating with their white peers in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision. Steve Suitts examines the parallels between de facto segregationist policies and the modern school choice movement. He ex-poses the dangers lying behind the smoke and mirrors of the so-called civil rights policies of Betsy DeVos and the education privatization lobbies. Economic and educational disparities have expanded rather than contract-ed in the years following Brown, and post-Jim Crow discriminatory policies drive inequality and poverty today. Suitts deftly reveals the risk that America’s underprivileged youth face as school voucher programs funnel public education funds into charter schools and predominantly white and wealthy private schools. (publ.)

Description: The letter waits in a book, in a box, in an attic, in an old house in Lambert, South Carolina. It’s waiting for Candice Miller. When Candice finds the letter, she isn’t sure she should read it. It’s addressed to her grandmother, after all, who left Lambert in a cloud of shame. But the letter describes a young African American woman named Siobhan Washington. An injustice that happened decades ago. A mystery enfolding the letter writer. And the fortune that awaits the person who solves the puzzle. Grandma tried and failed. But now Candice has another chance. So with the help of Brandon Jones, the quiet boy across the street, she begins to decipher the clues in the letter. The challenge will lead them deep into Lambert’s history–full of ugly deeds, forgotten heroes, and one great love–and deeper in-to their own families, with their own unspoken secrets. Can they find the fortune and fulfill the letter’s promise before the answers slip into the past yet again? (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Collects never-before-published photographs taken by Jim Lucas (1944-1980), an exceptional documentary photographer. His black and white images, taken during 1964 through 1968, depict events from the civil rights movement including the search for the missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the Meredith March Against Fear, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to the Mississippi Delta, and more. The photographs exemplify Lucas’s technical skill and reveal the essential truth in his subjects and the circumstances surrounding them. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 22 Jan. 2018 p. 75
Description: This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well as personal histories of rising from poverty and oppression, these leading lights of the legal profession and the fight for racial justice talk about the importance of reclaiming the racial narrative and keeping our eyes on the horizon as we work for justice in an unjust time. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 4 Aug. 2019 p. SR5 (cited)
Description: African American Catholics, though small in number and historically the targets of racial intolerance, are now the backbone of the church. The vast majority of African American Catholics do not perceive racial marginalization and intolerance in the church. African American Catholics are among the strongest religious identifiers in the church, while whites show a more fragile Catholic identity. The Catholic church may have finally overcome its racist past for the vast majority of African American Catholics, but serious concerns remain for white Catholics. Based on data from a national religion survey, this book explores religious attitudes from an African American Catholic perspective. … The authors present evidence that African American Catholics have a strong religious identity (stronger than white Catholics) and have various coping mechanisms to insulate them from negative racial experiences. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 June 2018 p. 108.
Description: Many of us believe in equality, diversity, and inclusion, but how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? Chugh reveals the surprising causes of inequality, and offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don’t look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves. (publ.)

Note: Dubuque All-Community-Reads 2019 selection.
Description: The story behind the unlikely friendship which developed between the accused rapist Ronald Cotton--who served eleven years in prison for a crime he didn't commit--and his accuser, Jennifer Thompson, raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept.

Reviewed: CHE 28 July 2017 (new books)
Description: Playing While White argues that whiteness matters in sports culture, both on and off the field. Offering critical analysis of athletic stars, as well as the predominantly white cultures of NASCAR and extreme sports, David Leonard identifies how whiteness is central to the commodification of athletes and the sports they play. (publ.)

Description: Robertson and Chaney examine how the early antecedents of police brutality like plantation overseers, the lynching of African American males, early race riots, the Rodney King incident, and the Los Angeles Rampart Scandal have directly impacted the current relationship between communities of color and police. Using a phenomenological framework, they analyze how African American college students perceive police to determine how race, gender, and education create different realities among a demographic. Based on their qualitative and quantitative findings, Robertson and Chaney offer recommended policies and strategies for police and communities to improve relationships and perceptions between the two. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 114
Description: Policing Black Bodies Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith make a compelling case that the policing of Black bodies goes far beyond these individual stories of brutality. They connect the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system, into a powerful narrative about the myriad ways Black bodies are policed. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 1 May 2017 p. 51; NYT/BR 30 July 2017 p. 13.
Description: A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation's most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The contributors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court's failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. (publ.)

Description: Known most prominently as a daring anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) worked tirelessly throughout her life as a political advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and members of the working class. Despite her significance, until the 1970s Wells-Barnett’s life, career, and legacy were relegated to the footnotes of history. Beginning with the posthumously published autobiography edited and released by her daughter Alfreda in 1970, a handful of biographers and historians–most notably, Patricia Schechter, Paula Giddings, Mia Bay, Gail Bederman, and Jinx Broussard–have begun to place the life of Wells-Barnett within the context of the social, cultural, and political milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 19 Dec. 2019 p. 59.
Description: This study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. It examines the legacy of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic “other.” Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet’s reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane “New Negro” portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet’s and Matisse’s depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices. (publ.)
Note: Catalog accompanied the exhibitions at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York, (October 24, 2018-February 10, 2019), & Musée d’Orsay (March 26-July 14, 2019).

Description: The recent wave of statues, building names, and other monuments memorializing figures like Christopher Columbus and Confederate generals being removed from public spaces and college campuses has brought the reassessment of historical figures to the fore. It has raised questions about whom we choose to venerate; how historical narratives form; and whether it is best to erase problematic figures from the historical record, present a new interpretation on them, or attempt to be as unbiased as possible by contemporary attitudes when regarding them. Readers will learn more about this timely and complicated issue through a wide range of perspectives. (publ.)
Note: Library Standing Order.

Participants: Ossie Davis, Denise Nicholas, Albert Jones, Erik Laray Harvey, Darnell Williams, Jeffrey Nash, Sharif Rasheed, & Stephen Rea.
Description: The USS Mason entered WWII on a presumably doomed mission. The all African-American crew overcame the harsh realities of war abroad and segregation at home, and was finally honored for its heroism in 1994.
Note: Based on the book, Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason, by Mary Pat Kelly (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995).

Note: Library standing order.
Description: The United States has had an active history of public protest since colonial times, with the Boston Tea Party serving as an emblematic example to this day. Protest in the United States is often associated with its zenith in the 1960s, but demonstrations of public outrage continue to play a major role in contemporary America, with notable recent examples ranging from the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter protests. Through this volume’s dynamic viewpoints, readers will gain a better understanding of the history of public protest, its differing manifestations, and its efficacy in promoting political and social change. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 19 May 2019 p. SR3 (author op./ed.); NYT/BR 9 June 2019 p. 12; LJ June 2019 p. 135; TLS 15 Nov. 2019 p. 4.
Description: On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship–after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody–not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan–seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of the color of her skin. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin’s mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the “welfare queen” myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 7 Nov. 2019 p. C8.
Description: Offers a ... chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure. (publ.)

Description: Many Americans believe they're living in a post-racial society, pointing to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency as evidence. Others believe that, despite the advances achieved by the civil rights movement, people of color are treated as second-class citizens. Is race overemphasized in America? Have government programs and policies done enough to level the playing field? Can the United States, a country that lives by the credo that all men are created equal, ever overcome its legacy of racism? Readers of this multifaceted anthology will be given the tools to form their own opinions about these complex issues. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Jan 2018 vol. 55 no. 5 (Highly recommended; Top 75 titles recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history. Provides information on hundreds of films chosen based on scholarly consensus of their importance regarding the subject, examining aspects of race and ethnicity in American film through the historical context, themes, and people involved. Highlights the most important films and artists of the era, identifying films, actors, or characterizations that were considered racist, were tremendously popular or hugely influential, attempted to be progressive, or some combination thereof. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Nov. 2017 p. 94
Description: Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being “postracial” we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their prejudice. When a recent Oxford study claimed to have found a drug that reduced implicit bias, it was only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis–and solution–for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices? (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: This book documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African American citizens and physicians in Mississippi and the United States. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day. They substantiate that current health disparities in the state are directly linked to America’s history of separation, neglect, struggle, and dis-parities. Contributors reveal details of individual physicians' journeys for recognition both as African Americans and as professionals in Mississippi. Despite discrimination by their white colleagues and threats of violence, a small but fearless group of African American physicians fought for desegregation of American medicine and society. For example, T.R.M. Howard, MD, in the all-black city of Mound Bayou led a private investigation of the Emmett Till murder that helped trigger the civil rights movement. Later, other black physicians risked their lives and practices to furnish care for white civil rights workers during the civil rights movement. … The introduction and essays address ongoing isolation and distrust among black and white colleagues in Mississippi. This book will stimulate dialogue, apology, and reconciliation, with the ultimate goal of improving disparities in health and health care and addressing long-standing injustices in our country. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR “It’s Been a Minute.”(10 Aug. 2018)
Description: For families, churches, educators, and communities who want to equip their children to be active and able participants in a society that is becoming one of the most racially diverse in the world while remaining full of racial tensions. For white people who are committed to equity and justice, living in a nation that remains racially unjust and deeply segregated creates unique conundrums. These conundrums begin early in life and impact the racial development of white children in powerful ways. What can we do within our homes, communities and schools? Should we teach our children to be “colorblind”? Or, should we teach them to notice race? What roles do we want to equip them to play in addressing racism when they encounter it? What strategies will help our children learn to function well in a diverse nation? Talking about race means naming the reality of white privilege and hierarchy. How do we talk about race honestly, then, without making our children feel bad about being white? Most importantly, how do we do any of this in age-appropriate ways? While a great deal of public discussion exists in regard to the impact of race and racism on children of color, meaningful dialogue about and resources for understanding the impact of race on white children are woefully absent. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Nov. 2019 p. 77.
Description: The true story of Sylvia Townsend, an African American girl who falls in love with ballet after seeing Swan Lake on TV. Although there aren’t many ballet schools that will accept a girl like Sylvia in the 1950s, her local bookmobile provides another possibility. A librarian helps Sylvia find a book about ballet and the determined seven-year-old, with the help of her new books, starts teaching herself the basics of classical ballet. Soon Sylvia learns how to fly–how to dance–and how to dare to dream. Includes a note from the author and a brief history of the bookmobile. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 19 Nov. 2017 p. 27
Description: Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called microaggressions, in addition to blunt-force insults, can puncture a person’s inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims's path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered “the other.” (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 98(1) Jan./Feb. 2019 p. 201.
Description: The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in Ameri-can history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson’s plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the “black codes,” would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. … Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement. In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original ac-count of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric. (publ.)

Description: This collection allows readers to gain new insights into the reconstruction era and the development of the industrial United States. Provides in-depth analysis of over twenty primary source documents to deliver a thorough examination of this important time in American history. (publ.)
Holdings Note: See elsewhere on this list for addition titles from this series on order.

Reviewed: CHE 6 Jan. 2017 (new books)
Description: Not only are #OscarsSoWhite, but white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers actors of color face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. Through nearly a hundred interviews with working actors, Nancy Wang Yuen reveals the biases they experience in talent agents' offices, at auditions, and on sets, yet also provides vital insights from actors of color who have succeeded on their own terms. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 books recommended as essential for community college libraries.
Description: Developmental equality–whether every child has an equal opportunity to reach their fullest potential–is essential for children’s future growth and access to opportunity. In the United States, however, children of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, poor educational out-comes, and structural discrimination, limiting their potential. In this book, Nancy E. Dowd sets out to examine the roots of these inequalities by tracing the life course of black boys from birth to age 18 in an effort to create an affirmative system of rights and support for all children. (publ.)

Description: Examines black women’s political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. …Making use of a vast and untapped array of black women’s artwork, political cartoons, manifestos, and political essays that they produced as members of groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Congress of African People, Farmer reveals how black women activists reimagined black womanhood, challenged sexism, and redefined the meaning of race, gender, and identity in American life. (publ.)

Description: Should descendants of slaves be compensated for the suffering their ancestors endured? Should the losing side in a war be forced to pay the victor? When modern-day states confront long-ago atrocities, is acknowledgement and an apology enough? This fascinating examination of reparations offers opinions by leading experts on such past injustices as the Holocaust, the slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the forced relocation of Native Americans, and the Imperial Japanese Army s comfort women. An asset to any library, Reparations takes on the very uncomfortable issue of how governments and individuals can reckon with sins of the past. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 26 Aug. 2017 p. 67; CHE 25 Aug. 2017 (new books); NYT/BR 24 Sept. 2017 p. 21; TLS 26 Jan. 2018 p. 3; FA 97(2) March/Apr. 2018 p. 175.
Description: During Reconstruction Northerners attempted to remake the United States in their own image. They would make incarnate the new world Republicans imagined at the end of the Civil War. That new world seemed possible because the Republican Party controlled the Union in 1865 as fully as any political party would ever control the country. Reconstruction would produce a nation built around free labor with a homogeneous citizenry whose rights would be guaranteed by a newly empowered federal government. Black as well as white citizens would inhabit a largely Protestant country of independent producers. They never realized that dream. The government’s attempts to implement this vision confronted significant obstacles. (publ.)
Library Holdings: NICC/Peosta has previous vols. in series: (1) The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Years (973.73 McP). – (2) Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (973 Ken). – (3) The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (on order). – (4) Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (973.92 Pat). – (5) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (973.5 How). – (6) From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (on order). – (7) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (973.4 Woo). – (8) Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (973.92 Pat).

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: The racial injustice that continues to plague the United States couldn’t be a clearer challenge to the country’s idea of itself as a liberal and democratic society, where all citizens have a chance at a decent life. Moreover, it raises deep questions about the adequacy of our political ideas, particularly liberal political theory, to guide us out of the quagmire of inequality. So what does justice demand in response? What must a liberal society do to address the legacies of its past, and how should we aim to reconceive liberalism in order to do so? In this book, Andrew Valls considers two solutions, one posed from the political right and one from the left. From the right is the idea that norms of equal treatment require that race be treated as irrelevant–in other words, that public policy and political institutions be race-blind. From the left is the idea that race-conscious policies are temporary, and are justifiable insofar as they promote diversity. This book takes issue with both of these sets of views, and therefore with the constricted ways in which racial justice is debated in the United States today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Nov. 2019 p. 77.
Description: When Sharon Langley was born, amusement parks were segregated, and African American families were not allowed in. This picture book tells how a community came together–both black and white–to make a change. In the summer of 1963, because of demonstrations and public protests the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Maryland became desegregated and opened to all for the first time. Sharon and her parents were the first African American family to walk into the park, and Sharon was the first African American child to ride the merry-go-round. This was on the same day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Sharon’s ride to remember demonstrated the possibilities of King’s dream … The carousel, fully functional, now resides on the National Mall, near the Air and Space Museum. (publ.)

Description: Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, it is the story of one family’s struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence. It is a story of physical survival, but more important, it is a story of the survival of the human spirit. And, too, it is Cassie’s story–Cassie Logan, an independent girl raised by a family for whom independence is primary, a family determined not to relinquish their humanity simply because they are Black. Cassie has grown up protected, grown up strong, and so far grown up unaware that any white person could force her to be untrue to herself, could consider her inferior and treat her accordingly. It took the events of one turbulent year–the year of the night riders and the burnings, the year a white girl humiliated Cassie in public simply because she was Black–to show Cassie why the land meant so much, why having a place of their own where they answered to no one permitted the Logans the luxuries of pride and courage their sharecropper neighbors couldn’t afford and their white neighbors couldn't allow. (publ.)
Note:

Reviewed: PW 7 Aug. 2017 p. 71 (starred); NYT/BR 27 Aug. 2017 p. 29.
Description: Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro–Puerto Rican named Arturo Schomburg. This law clerk’s life’s passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora and bring to light the achievements of people of African descent through the ages. When Schomburg’s collection became so big it began to overflow his house (and his wife threatened to mutiny), he turned to the New York Public Library, where he created and curated a collection that was the cornerstone of a new Negro Division. A century later, his groundbreaking collection, known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has become a beacon to scholars all over the world. (Publ.)

Reviewed: PW 28 Aug. 2017 p. 119; PW 11 Sept. 2017 p. 54; NYT/BR 10 Dec. 2017 p. 18.
Description: By legitimizing bigotry and redefining so-called American values, a revived Klan in the 1920s left a toxic legacy that demands reexamination today. A new Ku Klux Klan arose in the early 1920s, a less violent but equally virulent descendant of the relatively small, terrorist Klan of the 1870s. Unknown to most Americans today, this “second Klan” largely flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line—its army of four-to-six-million members spanning the continent from New Jersey to Oregon, its ideology of intolerance shaping the course of mainstream national politics throughout the twentieth century. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 8 Sept. 2019 p. SR7 (excerpt/op.ed); NYT/BR 13 Oct. 2019 p. 13; PW 24 June 2019 p. 163; NYRB 5 Dec. 2019 p. 24; LRB 30 July 2020 p. 21; TLS 21 Feb. 2020 p. 9.
Description: The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 12 Feb. 2018 p. 72; LJ 15 Feb. 2018 p. 72; Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Highly recommended; recommended for community college library collections)
Description: The definitive history of the Kerner Commission, whose report on urban unrest reshaped American debates about race and inequality. Historian Steven M. Gillon offers a revelatory new history of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders–popularly known as the Kerner Commission. Convened by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Newark and Detroit left dozens dead and thousands injured, the commission issued a report in 1968 that attributed the unrest to “white racism” and called for aggressive new programs to end discrimination and poverty. “Our nation is moving toward two societies,” it warned, “one black, and one white–separate and unequal.” (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 24 Feb. 2019 p. 11; PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 136; LJ Winter 2018 p. 87; Economist 9 Feb. 2019 p. 73; Choice (Sep. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with “separate but equal,” created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the nineteenth century, whose outcome em-braced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the twenty-first. … The book depicts indelible figures such as the re-sisters from the mixed-race community of French New Orleans, led by Lou-is Martinet, a lawyer and crusading newspaper editor; Homer Plessy’s law-yer, Albion Tourgée, a best-selling author and the country’s best-known white advocate for civil rights; Justice Henry Billings Brown, from antislavery New England, whose majority ruling endorsed separation; and Justice John Harlan, the Southerner from a slaveholding family whose singular dissent cemented his reputation as a steadfast voice for justice. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR
Note: Author interviewed on NPR show, Fresh Air, by host Terry Gross 20 Sept. 2016, “Sing For Your Life Recounts A Journey From Juvenile Detention To The Opera House”
Description: Story of a young black man’s journey from violence and despair to one of the world’s most elite artistic institutions. In 2011, at the age of twenty-four, Ryan Speedo Green won a nationwide competition hosted by New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Today, he is a rising star performing major roles at the Met and Europe’s most prestigious opera houses.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 4 Aug. 2019 p. 9.
Description: Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor. … National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood. Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, this book unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three fascinating Southern women. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 17 June 2018 (author op/ed)
Description: What is wrong with black women? Not a damned thing but the biased lens most people use to view them, says Tamara Winfrey Harris. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra of asexual and servile Mammy, angry and bestial Sapphire, and oversexed and lascivious Jezebel followed close behind. In the ‘60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These caricatures persist–even in the “enlightened” 21st century–through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and Top 40 lyrics. … The book takes sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women, replacing warped prejudices with the straight-up truth–the complicated but far-from-hopeless reality of being a black woman in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 27 May 2019 p. 81.
Description: Does racism have a rational basis in science? In this book, Gavin Evans tackles head-on the debate that has been raging on internet message boards and in academic journals. No longer limited to the fringe, race-based studies of intelligence have been discussed by thinkers such as Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. If these studies were true, they would provide an intellectual justification for inequality and discrimination. Examining the latest research on how intelligence develops and laying out new discoveries in genetics, palaeontology, archaeology and anthropology to unearth the truth about our shared past, Evans demolishes the pernicious myth that our race is our destiny and instead reveals what really makes us who we are. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a “Southern problem”? Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region's economic development has rarely received public recognition. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 9 Dec. 2016 p. 3
Description: Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 13 Nov. 2017 p. 54; LJ Dec. 2017 p. 112
Description: Editor at Large of the website, The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. She is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystallize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor’s seminal essay “The Meaning of a Word.” (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 7 Apr. 2019 p. 13; TLS 29 Nov. 2019 p. 16 (TLS Book of the Year 2019); NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019").
Description: Nearly forty years in solitary confinement in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell for 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit, Albert Woodfox survived and emerged with his humanity and sense of hope for the future intact. Ar-rested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Woodfox was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and put in solitary confinement without a shred of actual evidence against them. Re-leased in February 2016, Woodfox turned his anger into activism and resistance. This is his chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 24 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: NYRB 4 April 2019 p. 15.
Description: One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. This collection does more than present a decade’s worth of cult-reputation essays–it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force. In his celebrated and prescient essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award–winning “Paper Tigers,” he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to “tiger mother” parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine’s popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today’s Internet-mediated dating lives. Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first ex-posed. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public’s understanding of our country’s past, creating lasting images–both real and imagined–in American culture. This collection analyzes films through the lens of religion, politics, race, sex, and class, building a comprehensive look at the South as seen on screen. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice May 2018 vol. 55 no. 9 (Highly recommended; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: The Reconstruction Era–the years immediately following the Civil War when Congress directed the reintegration of the former Confederate states into the Union–remains, as historian Eric Foner suggests, Americas unfinished revolution. But Reconstruction is more than a story of great racial injustice; it has left a complex legacy involving both blacks and whites, Southerners and Northerners, that is reflected today by the fact that many of the states with the highest rates of poverty were part of the former Confederacy. In Southern Reconstruction, Philip Leigh examines Federal wartime legislation in order to broaden our understanding of Reconstruction, revealing how it led to African Americans being used as political pawns, first to ensure continued Republican rule, and finally to be blamed for the Souths hardships in order to draw poor whites away from Populism and back to the aristocratic white Democratic banner. (publ.)

Description: Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies–France, Britain, and the United States–profited from slave labor, empire, and colonialism, much like their Athenian predecessor. Hanchard follows these patterns through the Enlightenment and to the states and political thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he examines how early political scientists, including Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries, devised what Hanchard has characterized as “racial regimes” to maintain the political and economic privileges of dominant groups at the expense of subordinated ones. Exploring how democracies reconcile political inequality and equality, Hanchard debates the thorny question of the conditions under which democracies have created and maintained barriers to political membership. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 27 Nov. 2016 p. 1; Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title); LR Aug. 2017.
Note: Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2016.
Description: Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 8 Mar. 2020 p. 21.
Description: Before they were torn down in 2007, the Stateway Gardens public housing projects on Chicago’s South Side were known as a hot-bed of poverty, drugs, gangs, and crime. But for some, like Tracy, the shy, intelligent young boy at the center of this enthralling collection of linked stories, they are simply home. Set in the mid-1980s and taking readers up to the point of the destruction of the infamous Cabrini Green housing projects–similar to the Stateway Gardens projects to the South of them–this collection gives an intimate look at the hopes, dreams, failures and fortunes of a group of people growing up with the deck always stacked against them. Through Jasmon Drain’s sensitive and often playful prose, we see another side of what we have come to know as “the projects.” Stateway’s Garden is a com-ing-of-age story told in short stories, through the lens of a childhood made rough by the crush of poverty and violence, with the crack epidemic a looming specter ahead. And yet, through the experiences and ambitions of Tracy and other young characters, Drain reveals a vibrant community that creates its own ecosystem, all set in a series of massive, seemingly soulless concrete buildings. Not shying away from the darkness of life for his char-cters, Drain shows the full complexity of their human experiences. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 28 Apr. 2019 p. 14; TLS 16 Aug. 2019 p. 12; NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019"); NYRB 5 Dec. 2019 p. 24.
Description: A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring stain on the American mind. The story of the abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar one, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation came in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? … The story Gates tells begins with Union victory in the Civil War and the liberation of nearly four million enslaved people. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and diminished Northern will, re-stored “home rule” to the South. One of the most violent periods in our history followed the retreat from Reconstruction, with thousands of African Americans murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America’s fundamental historical tragedies, this book is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois created a counternarrative, and culture, inside the lion’s mouth. (publ)

Reviewed: NYRB 23 May 2019 p. 31.
Description: Analyzes the debates over the Compromise of 1850 to reveal the underlying assumptions and values of the North and the South a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. Rather than examining voting patterns, factional alignments, legislative maneuvering, and specific measures of the Compromise, this account looks at the language of the debate, the words of the senators and representatives, to discover the concepts and beliefs that defined the North and the South as the sectional confrontation approached. To a large extent, these opposing ideologies had common roots and were based on shared assumptions. Northerners and southerners had similar views of gender and masculinity, pursued the common goal of capital accumulation, and were in fundamental agreement over the superiority of the white race. But conflicting views of slavery, and especially slavery expansion, led to the development of highly divergent systems of belief about politics, economics, and society that would sustain the deepening sectional division and eventually support separation. This examination of the language of the debate yields a novel account of the dynamic driving the crisis of 1850 and sectional conflict generally. The ideological formulations of the Compromise debates of 1850 laid the foundations of the American Civil War. (publ.) “… By simply taking the debates seriously, Maizlish has made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Civil War.” (NYRB)

Description: This book examines the complex relationship between the Black Lives Mat-ter and All Lives Matter movements as it unfolds on social media and in of-fline interpersonal relationships. Exploring cultural influences like family history, fear, religion, postracialism, and workplace pressure, Edgar and Johnson trace the meanings of these movements from the perspectives of ordinary participants. They highlight the motivations for investing in so-cial movements and counter-movements to show how history, both remem-bered and misremembered, bubbles beneath the surface of online social justice campaigns. Social media users enact continuations of American his-tory through a lens of their own past experiences. This book ties together online and offline, national and local, and personal and political to under-stand one of the defining social justice struggles of our time–back cover. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 104; LR Aug. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the main-stream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. … At a time when racialized national-isms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, this work is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Topy 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, this book documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated. (publ.)

Description: Award-winning Congolese author Alain Mabanckou explores what it means to be black in the world today. Mabanckou confronts the long and entangled history of Africa, France, and the United States as it has been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and their legacy today. Without ignoring the injustices and prejudice still facing blacks, he distances himself from resentment and victimhood, arguing that focusing too intensely on the crimes of the past is limiting. Instead, it is time to ask: Now what? Embracing the challenges faced by ethnic minority communities today, Mabanckou looks to the future, choosing to believe that the history of Africa has yet to be written and seeking a path toward affirmation and reconciliation. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Le Sanglot de l’Homme Noir (Paris: Fayard, 2012).

Reviewed: NPR “Fresh Air” 6 Apr. 2017 (by John Powers); NYT/BR 30 Apr. 2017 p. 12; TLS 28 Apr. 2017 p. 26; LRB 15 Aug. 2019 p. 13.
Note: Originally published as: Los Niños Perdidos: Un Ensayo en Cuarenta Preguntas (Coyoacán, Ciudad de México: Sexto Piso, 2011).
Description: Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin-American children facing deportation, her book humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Recommended)
Description: This approach to the immigration debate takes the reader behind the blaring headlines and into communities grappling with the reality of new immigrants and the changing nature of American identity. Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, interviews nearly fifty local and national leaders from law enforcement, business, immigrant, and faith communities to illustrate the challenges and opportunities they face. From high school principals to church pastors to sheriffs, the author reveals that most people are working to advance society's interests, not exploiting a crisis at the expense of one community. As he shows, some cities and regions have reached a happy conclusion, while others struggle to find balance. Whether describing a pastor preaching to the need to welcome the stranger, a sheriff engaging the Muslim community, or a farmer's wind-whipped face moistened by tears as he tells the story of his farmworkers being deported, the author helps readers to realize that America's immigration debate isn't about policy; it is about the culture and values that make America what it is. The people on the front lines of America's cultural and demographic debate are Southern Baptist pastors in South Carolina, attorneys general in Utah or Indiana, Texas businessmen, and many more. Their combined voices make clear that all of them are working to make America a welcome place for everyone, long-established citizens and new arrivals alike. (publ.)

Description: A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews over the course of more than one year of reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland, and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the response to Michael Brown’s death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown’s family and the families of other victims as well as local activists. By posing the question “What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?” Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and too few jobs. (publ.)

Review: LJ Feb. 2019 p. 97.
Description: Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defend-ants were acquitted by an all-white jury. Emeritus professor William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 July 2019 p. 11.
Description: Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 20 May 2018 p. 9.
Description: Super Bowl Champion and three-time Pro Bowler Michael Bennett is an outspoken proponent for social justice and a man without a censor. He is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable. Bennett adds his unmistakable voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field. (publ.)

Description: Clarifies the relationship between biology and race, showing how racism can result from a misguided blending of biology with social construction. Using arresting examples, the authors aim to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. Controversial issues of race and IQ, race and athletic ability, and perceptions of race and beauty are examined, as are those of affirmative action and reparations for slavery. The authors also explore how income inequality, healthcare dis-parities, unequal access to education, an unfair justice system, and mass incarceration all call for constructive social policies that remodel American society in ways that will build a better, more resilient, and happier society. The goal is a society in which equal civil rights are clearly derived from the recognition of equal human rights, and equal opportunity provides the pathway to equitable results. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Sept. 2018 p. 66; PW 3 Sept. 2018 p. 89.
Description: After the death of her son, Eric Garner, at the hands of New York City police officers on Staten Island went viral, Gwen Carr’s life changed forever. The illegal chokehold that took Garner’s life has been seared into the public consciousness forever as the large black man struggled to breathe while a white policeman held him down on a hot concrete sidewalk. His death set the tone for a new normal where young black men and women now automatically document police interactions with their cell phones for fear of brutality and even death. As one of the Mothers of the Movement, Gwen Carr, a retired transit train operator, now dedicates her time to fighting for racial equality, especially the way law enforcement treats blacks in the United States. (publ)

Reviewed: PW 13 Nov. 2017 p. 55; NYT/BR 25 Mar. 2018 p. 26.
Description: Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins’ highly-anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a black woman today. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 20 Jan. 2017.
Description: In 1966, Allen Krause, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, conducted interviews with twelve Reform rabbis from various congregations throughout the South concerning their thoughts, principles, and activities as they related to the civil rights movement. ... The rabbis were extremely candid about their opinions and their own activities. The book's geographic scope is limited to the South–the rabbis interviewed served in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia–and the years between 1954 and 1967. ... While several of the rabbis interviewed stood up against the evils of the separate and unequal system, others made peace with it, or found reasons to justify inaction. ... In addition, the book provides a comparative framework for investigating the roles of other religious leaders in the civil rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world’s most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. This book goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of racial harmony, to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class and his call for “nonviolent resistance” to all forms of oppression–including the economic injustice that “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” Phase one of King’s agenda led to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But King also questioned what good it does a man to “eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” In phase two of his activism, King organized poor people and demonstrated for union rights, while also seeking a “moral revolution” to replace the self-seeking individualism of the rich along with an overriding concern for the common good. “Either we go up together or we go down together,” King cautioned, a message just as urgent in America today as then. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA Jan/Feb. 2017 p. 168; TLS 20 Jan. 2017 p. 14.

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 33.
Description: Since the Great Recession, most Americans’ standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality’s impact differs by race; African Americans’ net wealth is just a tenth that of white Americans, and over recent decades, white families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities–a dangerous combination he terms “toxic inequality.” (publ.)

Description: The lynching of African-Americans by white mobs is part of the deplorable history of racial prejudice and injustice in America. A marked increase in the incidence of lynching in early 1930 prompted the formation of the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, composed of Southern scholars and investigators (including African-Americans) and headed by the noted sociologist and civil rights activist Arthur F. Raper. Their study of more than 20 lynchings that occurred in 1930 was one of the most thorough and perceptive accounts and analyses ever done on the subject ... Each lynching is examined in detail: the alleged crime, the formation of the mob, and the behavior of the police. In addition, the historic and economic backgrounds of each county where the lynching occurred is examined, along with the existing race relations and attitudes of local leaders, churches, and the press. (publ.)
[NYT] "... the sociologist Arthur F. Raper estimated that, based on his study of 100 lynchings, white police officers participated in at least half of all lynchings and that in 90 percent of others law-enforcement officerse 'either condoned or winked at the mob action.'" (NYT/M 6/28/2020 p. 34)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 Nov. 2018 p. 26; PW 13 Aug. 2018 p. 44.
Description: This debut collection is a complicated love letter to Washington, DC, and to those who call it home: a TSA agent who’s never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, and a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. These characters navigate life’s “training school”–with lessons on gentrification and respectability–and fight to create their own sense of space and self. Camille Acker’s writing has appeared in Hazlitt and VICE, among others. Raised in Washington, DC, she currently lives in Chicago. (publ.)

Description: It is well established that all humans today, wherever they live, belong to one single species. Yet even many people who claim to abhor racism take for granted that human “races” have a biological reality. Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall provide a lucid and forceful critique of how scientific tools have been misused to uphold misguided racial categorizations. … They demonstrates conclusively that modern genetic tools, when applied correctly to the study of human variety, fail to find genuine differences. While the diversity that exists within our species is a real phenomenon, it nevertheless defeats any systematic attempt to recognize discrete units within it. The stark lines that humans insist on drawing between their own groups and others are nothing but a mixture of imagination and ideology. (publ.)

Description: In 1921 Tulsa’s Greenwood District, known then as the nation’s “Black Wall Street,” was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year, a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded Greenwood. By the end of the following day, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ashes, and perhaps as many as three hundred people were dead. This book shines new light into the shadows that have long been cast over this extraordinary instance of racial violence. Veteran journalist, author Randy Krehbiel digs deep into the events and their after-math and investigates decades-old questions about the local culture at the root of what one writer has called a white-led pogrom. He analyzes local newspaper accounts in an unprecedented effort to gain insight into the minds of contemporary Tulsans. In the process he considers how the Tulsa World, the Tulsa Tribune, and other publications contributed to the cir-umstances that led to the disaster and helped solidify enduring white justifications for it. Some historians have dismissed local newspapers as too biased to be of value for an honest account, but by contextualizing their re-ports, Krehbiel renders Tulsa’s papers an invaluable resource, highlighting the influence of news media on our actions in the present and our memories of the past. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 July 2018 p. 198.
Description: Author Bill Sizemore tells the story of his slave-owning Virginia family, their slaves, and those slaves’ descendants–a story that lay buried by a century of denial and historical amnesia. Its threads run through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the struggle for civil rights, and the crippling legacy of slavery that still plagues the nation to-day. In microcosm, it is the story of Virginia and the South. In telling it, Sizemore hopes to advance an essential, if painful, national conversation about race. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 6 June 2019 p. 46 (referenced)
Description: The essence of United States slavery was forced labor. Enslaved people’s unrequited toil built a significant portion of the nation’s wealth. They labored in many farming, mining, construction, transport, and factory settings. But by the 1830s most worked in cotton fields in the Deep South in the most important sector of the American economy. The cotton bales they made streamed into factories in New and old England, spun into yarn and woven into fabric clothing people across the globe. Cotton shipped abroad each year increased from just a few thousand bales in 1790 to four million by 1860. (publ.)

Description: It all started with Times photo editor Darcy Eveleigh discovering dozens of these photographs. She and three colleagues, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave and Rachel L. Swarns, began exploring the history behind them, and subsequently chronicling them in a series entitled Unpublished Black History, that ran in print and online editions of The Times in February 2016. … This book includes those photographs and many more, among them: a 27-year-old Jesse Jackson leading an anti-discrimination rally of in Chicago, Rosa Parks arriving at a Montgomery Courthouse in Alabama a candid behind-the-scenes shot of Aretha Franklin backstage at the Apollo Theater, Ralph Ellison on the streets of his Manhattan neighborhood, the firebombed home of Malcolm X, Myrlie Evans and her children at the funeral of her slain husband , Medgar, a wheel-chair-bound Roy Campanella at the razing of Ebbets Field. Were the photos–or the people in them–not deemed newsworthy enough? Did the images not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words at an institution long known as the Gray Lady? Eveleigh, Canedy, Cave, and Swarms explore all these questions and more in this one-of-a-kind book. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2016 vol. 53 no. 12 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries)
Description: Simultaneously a dignified woman and scrappy freedom fighter, Hedgeman's life upends conventional understandings of many aspects of the civil rights and feminist movements. She worked as a teacher, lobbyist, politician, social worker, and activist, often crafting and implementing policy behind the scenes. Although she repeatedly found herself a woman among men, a black American among whites, and a secular Christian among clergy, she maintained her conflicting identities and worked alongside others to forge a common humanity. (publ.)
Note: Hedgeman (1899-1990) was a native of Iowa, born in Marshalltown. She was raised and went to school in Anoka, Minn. and graduated from Hamline Univ. in St. Paul.

Description: This book presents a systematic introduction to issues related to the sociology and social psychology of hate and violence as they target people who are different in socially significant ways. It offers an integrated perspective on the causes and consequences of hate–motivated violence and the reasons we have not always been effective in stopping it. Not only do the authors address the experiences of racial, ethnic, and religious groups under attack, but also those who are victimized because of their sexual orientation, gender, gender-identity, age, or disability status. In addition, they include a chapter dedicated solely to the exploration of hate crimes, an evolving legal concept and public policy domain, as well as a chapter in which they suggest approaches that may be effectively applied collectively to the reduction of hate violence. Levin and Nolan take the position that support for hate-motivated violence originates not in the ranting and raving of a few bigoted extremists at the margins of society but in the tacit approval of ordinary, even decent, people who are located squarely in the mainstream. (publ.)

Description: As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of ac-tors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America–self-government, slavery, and native dispossession–took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 17 Feb. 2019 p. SR7 (referenced)
Description: This is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the antiracism movement as a whole. Exercises at the end of each chapter prompt readers to explore their own racialized ideas. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 17 Sept. 2018 p. 76; LJ 1 Nov. 2018 p. 77; NYT/BR 6 Jan. 2019 p. 9; NYRB 16 Jan. 2020 p. 29.
Description: Explains how fugitive slaves escaping from the South to the northern states awakened northerners to the true nature of slavery and how the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act divided the nation and set it on the path to civil war. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational reality. As violence in cities like New York and Los Angeles has fallen in recent years, in many Chicago communities, it has continued at alarming rates. Meanwhile, residents of these same communities have endured decades of some of the highest rates of arrest, incarceration, and police abuse in the nation. This book argues that these trends are connected. Crime in Chicago, as in many other US cities, has been fueled by a broken approach to public safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For nearly forty years, public leaders have attempted to create peace through punishment, misinvesting billions of dollars toward the suppression of crime, largely into a small subset of neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides. Meanwhile, these neighborhoods have struggled to sustain investments into basic needs such as jobs, housing, education, and mental healthcare. When the main in-vestment in a community is policing and incarceration, rather than human and community development, that amounts to a “war on neighborhoods,” which ultimately furthers poverty and disadvantage. Longtime Chicago scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper tell the story of one of those communities, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side that is emblematic of many majority-black neighborhoods in US cities. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 15 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it’s embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides–and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it–is books for young people. Philip Nel presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children’s literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 5 Mar. 2018 p. 63.
Description: All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label others, stigmatize others, paint others as undesirables–and to have these stories presented as scientific fact, God’s will, or wholesome entertainment. This book examines the origins and significance of several longstanding antiblack stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that support them. Here readers will find representations of the lazy, childlike Sambo, the watermelon-obsessed pickaninny, the buffoonish minstrel, the subhuman savage, the loyal and contented mammy and Tom, and the menacing, razor-toting coon and brute. (publ.)

Description: The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an Afri-can American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963. (publ.)
Note: Newberry Honor Book, 1996; Coretta Scott King Author Honor, 1996.

Reviewed: LJ 1 Nov. 2018 p. 79.
Description: Jabari Asim disrupts what Toni Morrison has exposed as the “Master Narrative” and replaces it with a story of black survival and persistence through art and community in the face of centuries of racism. In eight wide-ranging and penetrating essays, he explores such topics as the twisted legacy of jokes and falsehoods in black life; the importance of black fathers and community; the significance of black writers and stories; and the beauty and pain of the black body. What emerges is a rich portrait of a community and culture that has resisted, survived, and flourished despite centuries of racism, violence, and trauma. These thought-provoking essays present a different side of American history, one that doesn’t depend on a narrative steeped in oppression but rather reveals black voices telling their own stories. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 4 Mar. 2019 p. 74.
Description: From the row houses of Baltimore to the stoops of Brooklyn, with searing conviction and full compassion, D. Watkins, New York Times bestselling author lays bare the voices of the most vulnerable and allows their raw, intimate stories to uncover the systematic injustice threaded within our society. Honest and eye-opening, this book makes us listen, feel, and create a course toward change that starts right where we are. Watkins introduces you to Down Bottom, the storied community of East Baltimore that holds a mirror to America’s poor black neighborhoods–“hoods” that could just as easily be in Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, or Atlanta. As Watkins sees it, the perspective of people who live in economically disadvantaged black communities is largely absent from the commentary of many top intellectuals who speak and write about race. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/M 16 Feb. 2020 p. 46 (“The 1619 Project”)
Description: In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, over 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life. Demonstrating the resilience of African American families, she includes interviews from the living descendants of slaves sold on the auction block, showing how the memories of slavery have shaped people’s lives today. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 Oct. 2018 p. 32.
Description: Traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling Condé’s life in Sékou Touré’s Guinea to her time in Kwame N’Krumah’s Ghana, where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere and Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Condé’s deportation from Ghana. Settling down in Senegal, Condé ended her African years with close friends in Dakar, including filmmakers, activists and Haitian exiles, before putting down more permanent roots in Paris. Condé’s story is more than one of political upheaval, however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer. Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe, a French territory of the Caribbean. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 6 Nov. 2017 p. 74; PW 18 Dec. 2017 p. 21 (news article); LJ Dec. 2017 p. 112; NYT 25 Jan. 2018 p. C1; NYT/BR 25 Feb. 2018 p. 13; TLS 17 Aug. 2018 p. 12.
Description: The emotional and powerful story of one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter and how the movement was born. Patrisse Cullors’ story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and Asha Bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 17 Aug. 2018 p. 10.
Description: When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman has ever gone before. Yet several decades passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e. science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television--a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema's history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Denison University professor Diana Mafe showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 Apr. 2018 p. 78; NYT/M 7 July 2019 p. 14 (reference)
Description: Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America. (publ.)

Description: Examining racial profiling in American politics, philosopher Naomi Zack argues against white privilege discourse while introducing a new theory of applicative justice. Drawing clear lines between rights and privileges and between justice and existing laws, and examining the legal structure that has permitted the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and others, Zack shows why it is more important to consider black rights than white privilege as the country moves forward through today's culture of inequality. (publ.)
Contents: (1) White privilege, entitlements, and rights; (2) Black rights and police racial profiling; (3) Black injustice and police homicide.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 28 May 2017 p. 8 (Al Franken)
Description: As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, "white rage at work. … Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains." (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 6 July 2018 p. 3
Description: Provides a comprehensive and accessible exploration of white working-class politics and the populism that is transforming the transatlantic social and political landscape. In recent years, the world has been reintroduced to the constituency of “white working-class” people. In a wave of revolutionary populism, far right parties have scored victories across the transatlantic political world: Britain voted to leave the European Union, the United States elected President Donald Trump to enact an “America First” agenda, and Radical Right movements are threatening European centrists in elections across the continent. In each case, white working-class people are driving the reaction to the social change brought by globalization. In the midst of this rebellion, a new group consciousness has emerged among the very people who not so long ago could take their political, economic, and cultural primacy for granted. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 111
Description: Award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanized, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge has written a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary examination of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today (publ.)

Reviewed: Nation 21 Oct. 2019 p. 28.
Description: From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his new history, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces black workers’ complicated journey from the transatlantic slave trade through the American Century to the demise of the industrial order in the 21st century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. (publ.)

Description: Nardon offers a comprehensive framework for understanding intercultural interactions and developing skills for successful intercultural situations. Numerous examples and exercises, including how to reconcile personal beliefs of equality with a hierarchical workplace and how to respond to perceived aggressiveness in business negotiations, enable employees and managers to embark on reflective processes that will springboard their intercultural competence. (publ.)

Description: What was daily life really like for ordinary African American people in Jim Crow America, the hundred-year period of enforced legal segregation that began immediately after the Civil War and continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965? What did they eat, wear, believe, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they value? What did they do for fun? This encyclopedia explores the lives of average people through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set examines social history topics–including family, political, religious, and economic life–as it illuminates elements of a society’s emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between individuals and the great-er world. It is broken up into topical sections, each dealing with a different aspect of cultural life. Each section opens with an introductory essay, fol-lowed by A–Z entries on various aspects of that topic. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.
Description: Since 1989, there have been over 2,200 exonerations in the United States. These have resulted from a number of factors, including the discovery of new evidence, perjury, false identification, and bad forensic evidence. Even when an individual is exonerated, is it possible to compensate them for their loss of time and money? This volume looks at the issue from varying perspectives, exploring causes of wrongful convictions, ways to increase exonerations for those who were unjustly imprisoned, strategies to decrease the number of wrongful convictions going forward, and appropriate compensation for those who have lost years of their lives. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 11 Dec. 2018 p. 169
Description: This book brings together 52 iconic talents from the past and present and celebrates their inspirational achievements while young. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 29 July 2018 p. 19.
Description: A collection of culturally charged comics by cartoonist Ben Passmore. Passmore masterfully tackles comics about race, gentrification, the prison system, online dating, gross punks, bad street art, kung fu movie references, beating up God, and lots of other grown-up stuff with refreshing doses of humor and lived reliability. (publ.)