Juneteenth: Readings and Resources

"Despite Black Americans being at high risk for negative mental health symptoms due to racism and other chronic stresses, disparities persist in the provision of mental health services to this population. This book addresses that gap in clinical practice by explicitly calling attention to the experience of race-based stress in the Black community. Johnson and Melton urge mental health practitioners to action in promoting societal understanding, affirmation, and appreciation of multiculturalism against the damaging effects of individual, institutional, and societal racism, prejudice, and all forms of oppression based on stereotyping and discrimination."

"Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and acquittal, the book traces Davis's life and work during the subsequent decades and her influential career as a public intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis's political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials."

"An essential collection of essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students, and activists who have been building the Black Lives Matter at School movement across the country, including a foreword by Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi."

"The text demonstrates the way in which Malcolm X's philosophy lies at the intersection of the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon and is an integral part of the revolutionary politics formed to alleviate the plight of people of African descent globally. Exploring themes of ontology, the body, geographic space and revolution, Black Minded provides a much-needed appraisal of Malcolm X's political philosophy."

"'Black People Are My Business': Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monograph that focuses on Bambara's unique approach and important literary contribution to 1970s and 1980s African American literature. It explores her unique nationalist, feminist, Marxist, and spiritualist ethos, which cleared space for many innovations found in black women's fiction."

"... considers both popular and literary texts that range from Beyoncé's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a call for what Jared Sexton calls "the dream of Black Studies"-abolition:"

"This book is a compact, exceptionally diverse introduction to the history of Black women, from the first African woman who arrived in America to the women of today."

"During the early Great Depression, African American women in the Midwest directly engaged with members of the American Communist Party to fight unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and racial discrimination in the workplace. This book highlights these struggles and brings them to the forefront of Black radicalism during the Great Depression, focusing on the cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis."

"Each chapter contextualizes the role that Black women in the United States play in the global project of Black consumption, questioning which dolls, which princesses, which rags-to-riches narratives, and which characteristics represent the repertoire of Black girlhood. Through themes of self-making and objectification in dolls, princesses, and hip-hop, Buy Black maps the imagined space of "America" and the cultural attitudes that produced a twenty-first-century Black American sensibility based in representation and consumerism."

"This book tells the story of the rise and fall of the first civil rights era, viewed through the lens of action in the US Congress. The first civil rights era, as we define it, extends from 1861 through 1918, or from the Civil War through the First World War. During that time the formal status of African Americans shifted from slave to citizen and then to something in between. This distinctive path was largely determined by laws and, later, failed laws in Congress. Many books tell the story of African Americans during these years. Our book is explicitly about how the arc of civil rights was determined by Congress over these five decades and more."

"While the COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating health and economic impacts in the United States, communities of color, especially Black communities, have been disproportionately affected. On June 23, 2020, the Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop to discuss the landscape of COVID-19, including how systemic racism contributes to the disproportionate effects related to infection rates and mortality of this virus and other health conditions. Presenters highlighted relevant research and creative responses from many perspectives, including how Black scientists, engineers, and doctors are contributing to solutions and are ready to do more. National Academies leaders and members also discussed the role of the National Academies in addressing the pandemic and underlying issues of systemic racism that have led to health disparities in the United States. This publication summarizes the presentation and discussion of the workshop."

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought."

"This exhibition catalog to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse chronicles the pervasive visual and sonic parallels in the work of Black artists from the southern United States. It looks to contemporary southern hip-hop as a portal into the roots and aesthetic legacies that have shaped contemporary art from the 1920s to the present. It features multiple generations of both academically trained and 'outsider' artists working in a variety of genres and disciplines, including Thornton Dial, Allison Janae Hamilton, Arthur Jafa, Jason Moran, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Sun Ra, Kara Walker, and William Edmondson. Creating a capacious understanding of southern expression in visual art, material culture, and music, this richly illustrated volume documents the exhibition's artworks and includes critical essays, poems, artist biographies, and an extended bibliography."

"Rather than simply engaging in a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement are shunned alike, Disabilities of the Color Line argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability as a part of Black social life in varied and complex ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been and are made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and society. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of commonality and community that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability but also from a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order."

"This book introduces new audiences to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final initiative, the multiracial Poor People's Campaign (PPC) of 1968. Robert Hamilton depicts the experience of poor people who traveled to Washington in May 1968 to dramatize the issue of poverty by building a temporary city, Resurrection City. His narrative allows us to hear their voices and understand the strategies, objectives, and organization of the campaign. In addition, he highlights the campaign's educational aspect, showing that significant social movements are a means by which societies learn about themselves and framing the PPC as an initiative whose example can teach and inspire current and future generations."

"This straight-forward and reader-friendly text provides strategies for P-12 educators who are interested in ensuring the cultural and academic excellence of African American students. It presents a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant teaching, and research-based cases of teachers who excel at teaching Black children.

"Riché Richardson examines how five iconic black women--Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé--defy racial stereotypes and construct new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States."

"Adeyemi's framework of "feeling right" instead offers a closer, kinesthetic look at how black queer women adroitly manage feeling itself as a complex right they should be afforded in cities that violently structure their movements and energies. What emerges in Feels Right is a sensorial portrait of the critical, black queer geographies and collectivities that emerge in social dance settings and in the broader neoliberal city."

"Paul Butler considers NWA's 1988 song, "Fuck tha Police," as an invitation to think about putting the police on trial for crimes against African Americans. It examines the resonance of "Fuck tha Police" over time, up to and including the George Floyd inspired protests."

"Activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that the new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation."

"The Gullah culture, though borne of isolation and slavery, thrived on the US East Coast sea islands from pre-Civil War times until today, and nowhere more prominently than on Hilton Head Island, SC. On this small barrier island descendants of the first generations of Gullah people continue to preserve Gullah language, customs, arts, and cuisine. The three authors of Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956 are among those descendants, and in this book, they chronicle the amazing history of their secluded community from the Civil War through the 1950s, when real estate development connected Hilton Head Island to the mainland with a bridge."

"Merging theory and praxis, Murillo engages with Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Kiese Laymon's Long Division, Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, and Paul Beatty's The Sellout to show how Afro-pessimism offers new ways to think about anti-Black racism and practice Black creativity."

"Infamous Bodies portrays five black women "celebrities" from the late-18th and 19th centuries whose histories and ongoing fame have generated new ways of imagining black feminist futures. Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Saartjie Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Bonetta have each become crucial figures for black feminists, who have frequently re-imagined these women's public and private lives, celebrating them as subjects who complicate a binary understanding of agency and subjection. Centering black women's lives at the fulcrum of developing freedom and rights discourses in the US and Europe, Samantha Pinto seeks to rewrite the history of modern nationhood through stories of black female subjectivity. The book's five chapters trace the historical significance of these figures, as well as the contemporary cultural artworks and performances that have rendered them celebrities for black feminist study.

"... engages ways in which African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggle for freedom and liberty as a feature of changes within the Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture how African Americans grappled with those questions, as the struggle for liberty in the United States continued through the end of the nineteenth century, when new regimes of power implemented systems of racial oppression that truncated what the historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries calls "Freedom Rights" for freedmen and women after the passing of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. This book charts the diverse ways in which African Americans utilized the Atlantic world in search of the ideals of liberty that they were denied at home. Black internationalism included emigration abroad, lecture tours in Europe denouncing slavery, and missionary activity in King Leopold's Congo, illustrating an international consciousness among black Americans."

"The purpose of this book is to illuminate scholarship on Black women and girls throughout the educational pipeline. The contributors--all Black women educators, scholars, and advocates--name the challenges Black women and girls face while pursuing their education as well as offer implications and recommendations for practitioners, policymakers, teachers, and administrators to consider in ensuring the success of Black women and girls."

"The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865."

"... explores how fantasy-especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish-is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt 'fantasy-acts' against antiblackness, a transgressive way of 'reading' beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities."

"A dynamic chronological study, the book explores how Black women public intellectuals, creative writers, and classic blues singers sometimes utilize singular but other times overlapping forms of literacies to engage in debates on race."

"The Meaning of Soul discusses Black resilience and innovation through soul music and soul logic. Emily Lordi analyzes soul music and musicians from the 1960s, the 1970s, and after, bridging the different valences of soul as a way of moving through the world. The book encompasses soul's racial-political meanings while being sensitive to the details of the music and small details that shaped artists' lives and their relationship to soul."

"Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly-line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America. A history of the last half-century and an intimate conversation with one of music's most influential and original voices, Music Is History is a singular look at contemporary America."

"This book analyzes the emancipation activism of free black people who settled in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois. Antebellum activists defined emancipation on their own terms, through the construction of churches, schools, and political conferences"

"... brings together a diverse group of scholars who discuss how k-12 Black history is understood in education. The book's chapters focus on the question, what is Black history, and explores that inquiry through various mediums including its foundation, curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and psychology. The book provides researchers, teacher educators, and historians an examination into how much k-12 Black history has come and yet how long it still needed to go."

"In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren Davis and David Wilson explore the idea that racial resentment, rather than simply racial prejudice, is the basis for growing resistance among whites to efforts to improve the circumstances faced by minorities in the United States. The authors start with the idea that there is growing sentiment among whites that they are "losing-out" and "being cut in line" by Blacks and other minorities, as reflected in an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, multiculturalism, trigger warnings, and political correctness, an increase in African Americans occupying powerful and prestigious positions, and the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president."

"This book brings together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how Black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for sociopolitical power."

"By the mid-nineteenth century, an increasing number of enslaved people had fled northward along the Atlantic seaboard. While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this groundbreaking volume expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what the journey looked like for many African Americans. With innovative scholarship and thorough research,Sailing to Freedom highlights little-known stories and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African Americans' paid and unpaid waterfront labor."

"Sampling and Remixing Blackness is a timely and accessible book that examines the social ramifications of cultural borrowing and personal adaptation of Hip-hop culture by non-Black and non-African American Black artists in theater and performance. In a cultural moment where Hip-hop theater hits such as Hamilton offer glimpses of Black popular culture to non-Black people through musical soundtracks, GIFs, popular Hip-hop music, language, clothing, singing styles and embodied performance, people around the world are adopting a Blackness that is at once connected to African American culture--and assumed and shed by artists and consumers as they please."

"These engaging true stories show that for most of American history, the law was an enemy to the Black Woman. Using perseverance, tenacity, intelligence and faith, she turned the law into a weapon to combat discrimination, a prestigious occupation, and a platform from which she could lift others as she rose."

"The authors explore the meaning of skin color in contemporary American society, with an eye toward the ways in which skin color is intertwined with political views. They study the construction of racialized identities and its relationship to social and economic disparities in the United States. The book includes both human- and machine-assessed measures of skin color in a survey that considers political attitudes."

"This book explores the historical connections among jazz, African American Islam, and black internationalism from the 1940s to the 1970s. It shows that in the post-World War II era through the 1970s, the social justice values that Islam and jazz shared were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. This book argues that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a black-Atlantic cool that shaped both black religion, jazz styles, and black masculinity and femininity during the Cold War and continuing up to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the 1960s."

"Synthesizing some 250 scholarly works about Morrison's writing, this book examines eight novels as well as the short story "Recitatif" (widely taught in classrooms worldwide). They are analyzed for techniques used to deepen meaning and emotional weight, and reveal Morrison's mastery over prose."

"What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle."

"This book draws from the successes of award-winning schools, teachers, students, and parents to help leaders understand how they can positively change the educational experience of Black students. When Black Students Excel offers real-life examples of outstanding elementary, middle, and high schools where teachers and school leaders have rejected policies and practices built upon deficit perceptions about the capacity of Black students. Chapters highlight leadership implications and offer specific suggestions for educators who are seeking to transform their schools in ways that advance the success of Black students."

"By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild--a one-armed, impassioned abolitionist--set out from Portsmouth to hunt down the rebel guerrillas and extinguish the threat. From this little-known historical episode comes Black Cloud Rising, a dramatic, moving account of these soldiers--men who only weeks earlier had been enslaved, but were now Union infantrymen setting out to fight their former owners."

"Cassie Louise Lightfoot has a dream: to be free to go wherever she wants for the rest of her life. One night, up on “tar beach,” the rooftop of her family’s Harlem apartment building, her dreams come true. The stars lift her up, and she flies over the city, claiming the buildings and the city as her own."

"Ruth and the Green Book is the story of one Black family’s trip from Chicago to Alabama by car in the late 1940s. Along the way they encounter prejudice, but they also discover The Green Book, a real guide to accommodations which was published for decades to aid African American travelers as they faced prejudice on the roads across the country."

"Told through a series of diary entries, this Coretta Scott King Honor winner follows Patsy, a recently freed 12-year-old girl living in Mars Bluff, S.C., during the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Patsy observes all of the changes taking place around her and celebrates no longer having to hide her ability to read and write, allowing her to forge a better life for herself and for fellow former enslaved people."