51 results for "American History"

The hands of peace

Ingram, Marione,Henderson, Thelton E.
"Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, only to find when she came to the United States that racism was as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. Moving first to New York and then to Washington, DC, Marione joined the burgeoning civil rights movement, protesting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and other aspects of life in the nation's capital, including the denial of voting rights. She was a volunteer in the legendary March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, and she was an organizer of an extended sit-in to support the Mississippi Freedom Party. In 1964, at the urging of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Marione went south to Mississippi. There, she worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and taught African American youth at one of the country's controversial freedom schools. With her boldness came threats--white supremacists made ominous calls and left a blazing cross in front of her school--and an arrest and conviction. She narrowly escaped a three-month prison sentence. As a white woman and a Holocaust escapee, Marione was perhaps the most unlikely of heroes in the American civil rights movement; and yet, her core belief in the equality of all people, regardless of race or religion, did not waver and she refused to be quieted, refused to accept bigotry. This empowering, true story offers a rare up close view of the civil rights movement. It is a story of conviction and courage--a reminder of how far the rights movement has come and the progress that still needs to be made."--Page 2 of book jacket.
Skyhorse Publishing 2015 177 pages

Race and revolution

Shachtman, Max
A riveting inquiry into black history and American racism published here for the first time, Race and Revolution is a work of radiant insight and bold logic. Astonishingly advanced for its time, the document was originally drafted in 1933 as Communism and the Negro and was by far the most comprehensive statement on race produced by the Left Opposition, the dissenting Communist tendency led by Leon Trotsky. Race and Revolution places the black struggle for freedom and equality at the heart of American history. Racial oppression, Shachtman argues, can be comprehended only within the totality of social and class relations. The document culminates in a devastating polemic against the Communist Party’s call for a Black Belt state in the American South. A clarifying introduction by Christopher Phelps explains the document’s historical genesis, compares it to the views of Trotsky and C. L. R. James, and evaluates it in light of subsequent theoretical and historical developments.
Verso 2003-05-17 108 pages

Facing Black and Jew: literature as public space in twentieth-century America

Newton, Adam Zachary
A reading of African American and Jewish American writers from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton's book offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in modern American literature, and rethinking the sometimes vexed relationship between two constituencies ordinarily confined to sociopolitical or media commentary alone. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. Through artful, dialogical readings of Saul Bellow and Chester Himes, David Mamet and Anna Deavere Smith, and others, Newton seeks to represent American Blacks and Jews outside the distorting mirror of 'Black-Jewish Relations', and restrictive literary histories alike. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.
Cambridge University Press 1999-07-15 218 pages

Hybrid hate: conflations of antisemitism and anti-black racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich

Parfitt, Tudor
"The study of western racism has tended to concentrate either on the hatred and murder of Jews or the hatred and enslavement of black people. As chief objects of racism Jews and Blacks have been linked together for centuries, peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In medieval Europe Jews were often perceived as Blacks, and the conflation of Jews and Blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of Black Jews in Loango in west Africa in 1777, and later of black Jews in India, the Middle East and other parts of Africa, the figure of the hybrid black Jew was thrust into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. The new hybrid played a particular role in the great battle between monogenists and polygenists as they sought to establish the unitary or disparate origins of humankind. From the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse which combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the west. While Hitler considered Jews 'Negroid parasites', in Nazi Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws and cartoons, Jews and Blacks were combined in the figure of the Black/Jew, the mortal foe of the Aryan race"-- Provided by publisher
Oxford University Press 2025 290 pages

My long journey home

Golden, Lily
The daughter of Oliver Golden, an African American expatriate and agrarian activist of the early 1900's, and Bertha Bialek, youngest daughter of Polish American emigres of Jewish descent, Lily Golden has a special place in history. In this account of her experience, Golden provides a connection between the contemporary and historical relationships of America to Russia. Golden offers a distinctly different and refreshing point of view of the lives and experiences of Russia in her often alluring and romantic, sometimes bitterly painful, yet always vivid and intimate details of her life as a dark-skinned Russian surviving in and struggling against turbulent changes. She brings her tale of a sometimes charmed sometimes challenged existence full circle in her descriptions of her ultimate contact with distant relatives in the United States. Lily Golden allows the reader access into her lifelong revelation that family and community ties are boundless by time and geography.--page 4 of cover.
Third World Press 2002-01-01 211 pages

Do lord remember me

Lester, Julius
In a gray fieldstone house in Nashville, Tennessee, the Reverend Joshua Smith Sr.--the staunch and gentle man known to thousands in black churches throughout the South as the Singing Evangelist and to one white reporter as "the Colored Billy Graham"--is trying to compose his own obituary on what will be the last day of his life. In doing so, he looks back over that life--from his childhood in rural nothern Mississippi to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, from tears of humiliation to songs of celebration and triumph. When Do Lord Remember was first published in 1984, the Chicago Sun-Times compared it to Alex Haley's Roots , Newsday described it as "exquisitely crafted," People as "distinguished," the Philadelphia Inquirer as "riveting," and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer declared "every page has something worth remembering." Twenty years later and now a classic, Do Lord Remember Me is an eloquent and deeply moving story about a black family's dignified struggle for survival.
Griffin 2004-10 224 pages

L-vis lives! racemusic poems / Kevin Coval

Coval, Kevin
FROM THE POET the Chicago Tribune calls the new voice of Chicago, comes L-vis Lives!, a bold new collection of poetry and prose exploring the collision of race, art, and appropriation in American culture. L-vis is an imagined persona, a representation of artists who have used and misused Black music. Like so many others who gained fame and fortune from their sampling, L-vis is as much a sincere artist as he is a thief. In Kevin Coval's poems, L-vis' story is equal parts forgotten history, autobiography, and re-imaginings. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history's more obscure whiteboy heroes and anti-heroes: legendary breakdancers, political activists, and music impresarios. A story of both artistic theft and radical invention, L-vis Lives! is a poetic novella on all of the possibilities and problems of post-racial" American culture-where Black art is still at times only fully accepted in a white face, and every once in a while an L-vis" comes along to step in to the void. i am a hero to most. the great hope of something other. a complex back-story. something other than the business of my father. Bland's antonym. jim crow's black sheep. the forgotten son left to rise in the darkness among the dis carded in the wild of working class, single mother hoods. a hero who transcends who translates the dis satisfactions of the plains; kids of kurt cobain, method man amphetamine, the odd Iowan who digs dirt and lights beyond the pig yard, spits nebraskan argot, hero to the heart land, middle brow(n) america "--
Haymarket Books 2011 103 pages