Black History

Malcolm X, by Alex Haley





Amazon description:

Malcolm X’s searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there’s the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture–try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston’s Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can’t help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book,” he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s during the civil rights struggle of the ’60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. –Wendy Smith

The Negro Caravan, by Sterling A. Brown





Anthology of African American literature.

Black Heroes of The 20th Century, by Jessie Carney Smith





Amazon Description:


A landmark compendium of African American achievement over the past 100 years, this text explores the lives and work of 150 men and women who have profoundly influenced our culture. Through their inspirational stories, Smith presents a compelling means for African American individuals to further explore their rich heritage and for all Americans to reflect upon a century of accomplishment. 150 photos.

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen





Notes on this book in the Julien Catalogue:

With 10 pages containing Jackson’s mediation on the pages, Including the underlining and highlighting of certain passages, as well as the words, “Wow,” “Sad,” “Wrong,” “Hateful” and “Sick” in the margins repeatedly.


Amazon Description:

These images make the past present. They refute the notion that photographs of charged historical subjects lose their power, softening and becoming increasingly aesthetic with time. These images are not going softly into any artistic realm. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. And what it still means. — New York Times, January 13,2000

Black in America, by Eli Reed





Amazon Description:

Photographer Eli Reed documents the black experience in America, from tender moments between parents and children and the deceptive innocence of rural life, to the tensions of the urban drug scene. His work seeks to show the truth, in images of black America pictured with anger and compassion.

King: A Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jnr, by Charles Johnson, Bob Adelman





Amazon Description:


The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement is well documented in prose, but for sheer emotional power, nothing can compare to the pictures from this era. It’s a challenge for a writer’s words to match the force of Bob Adelman’s photographs in this book, but novelist and essayist Charles Johnson rises to the task in his treatment of King’s life and death, as well as the heroic struggle of African Americans in the United States. Johnson, the author of Middle Passage (which won the 1990 National Book Award), offers an exceptional counterpoint to the stirring images with the depth and weight of his essays and captions. “How soon we forget that King was not only a civil rights activist,” Johnson writes, “but also this country’s preeminent moral philosopher, a spiritual aspirant, a father and a husband, and that these diverse roles–these multiple dimensions of his too brief life–were the foundations for his singular ‘dream’ that inspired millions worldwide.”

In Praise of Black Women, Volume 1: Ancient African Queens, by Simone Schwarz-Bart





Amazon description:


Novelists Simone Schwarz-Bart (Between Two Worlds; The Bridge of Beyond) and Andr‚ Schwarz-Bart (The Last of the Just) present volume one of a four-part work that will be published over the next three years entitled In Praise of Black Women: Ancient African Queens, translated from the French by Rose-Myriam R‚jouis and Val Vinokurov and featuring a foreword by Howard Dodson, director of New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A blend of oral tradition, historical accounts and 600 vivid illustrations creatively arranged and bordered by informative sidebars, this enchanting work transports the reader back in time and gives a voice to the little-known black women of the past, like Yennenga, Mother of the Mossi People. Subsequent volumes will cover slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, modern African women and modern women of the diaspora.

The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present, by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary MacAustin





Amazon description:

Ordinary black women, more than any other group in America, have been left out of history. As Darlene Clark Hine points out in her introduction to this powerful and affecting book, “disseminating a visual history is more important with Black women, perhaps, than with any other single segment of the American population. We know all too well what this society believes black women look like. The stereotypes abound, from the Mammy to the maid, from the tragic mulatto to the dark temptress. America’s perceptions of Black women are colored by a host of derogatory images and assumptions that proliferated in the aftermath of slavery and, with some permutations, exist even today. We have witnessed the distortion of the image of black women in movies and on television. We have seen black women’s faces and bodies shamed and exploited. What we have not seen is the simple truth of their lives. This book will help to eradicate, or at least to dislodge, the many negative and dehumanizing stereotypes and caricatures of Black women that inhabit our consciousness.

What do black women look like? What do they look like at work or with their families? What faces do they choose to present to the world, and what faces has the world forced them to acquire? We can look in vain to most pictorial histories of America and even of African America for images of Black women. With noteworthy exceptions, even scholarly studies in Black women’s history tend to include few, if any, photographic images. Of the images that previously have been presented in print, the majority have been of famous Black women.

The Face of Our Past brings the ordinary Black woman to center stage, showing how she lives, loves her family, works to survive, fights for her people, and expresses her individuality. In addition to 302 cartefully chosen images, Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin provide quotations from letters, diaries, journals, and other sources

Before the Mayflower, by Lerone Bennet Jr





Friend Steve Manning:
http://www.positivelymichael.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-13306.html


He loved “Before the Mayflower”, by Lerone Bennet Jr. His parents always instilled Black history in him.


Amazon description:


“…one of the top 10 influential black books…Highly recommended.” — Black History 365, Volume Two Issue Two, Autumn 2008. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey and slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, to life in the 1990s.