In The Revolution Has Come Robyn C. Spencer traces the Black Panther Party’s organizational evolution in Oakland, California, where hundreds of young people came to political awareness and journeyed to adulthood as members. Challenging the belief that the Panthers were a projection of the leadership, Spencer draws on interviews with rank-and-file members, FBI files, and archival materials to examine the impact the organization’s internal politics and COINTELPRO’s political repression had on its evolution and dissolution.
Can a type of music be”owned”? Examining how music is linked to racial constructs and how African American musicians and audiences reacted to white appropriation, Blues Music in the Sixties shows the stakes when whites claim the right to play and live the blues. In the 1960s, within the larger context of the civil rights movement and the burgeoning counterculture, the blues changed from black to white in its production and reception, as audiences became increasingly white. Yet, while this was happening, blackness–especially black masculinity–remained a marker of authenticity.
Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto YES, WE CAN. An African American obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington DC, she was descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and a judge. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, desperate poverty, and lynch mobs, she advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign governments on public health issues. Though articulate, visionary, talented, and skillful at managing her publicity, she was also tragically flawed. Ferebee was president of the Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority and later became the president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the nascent civil rights era.
The book is a coming of age story and a personal account of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as witnessed and experienced by the author. It contains stories about the individual and collective struggle for equality in a small Mississippi town. The book features and honors those unsung heroes whose bravery and example contributed significantly to the movement. The book tells the story of a young boy whose life is influenced by the movement that contributed significantly to his development and coming of age from childhood to adulthood.
From 1891 to 1922, Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades. These burnings typically featured carnival atmospheres with thousands in attendance, including men, women and children who later described the spectacles as jovial “barbecues” or “roasts,” and commemorated the events with “lynching” postcards. It was a period when many white Texans—previously enraged by Reconstruction—reasserted white primacy and terrorized black Texans with impunity. Join author E. R. Bills in this recounting of an African American holocaust.
