Juneteenth: Readings and Resources

"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."

"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."

"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.

"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."

"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."

"After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery."

"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."

"... a unique historical account of the long-term response to emancipation in African American communities in the South. Throughout this project, Thulani Davis draws from primary archival sources as well as the work of historians as a way of closely examining the emergence, sustenance, and spread of viable independent Black politics produced during slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the aftermath."

"... 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:"

"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."

"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."

"Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed-herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s-forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all."

"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 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 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"

"... 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."

"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."

"... 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"This book is Clint Smith's contemporary portrait of the United States of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks, those that are honest about the past and those that are not, that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing."

"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."

Fiction. "Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it--for herself and for generations to come."

Fiction. "Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of sanctuary, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when a older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony."

"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."