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books

The Roots of Black Incarceration

Joy James Boston Review
This recently unearthed text portrays the life of a 19th Century African American who spent much of his life in prison. Joy James guides us through this "startling," yet "instructive" book.

books

The Truth About Abolition

Adam Rothman The Atlantic
A new book about the abolitionist movement puts African Americans in the center of the history of our country's movement to end slavery.

The Police Beating That Opened America's Eyes to Jim Crow's Brutality

Chris Lamb The Conversation
Over the years, Woodward’s beating receded behind more publicized stories like the lynching of Emmett Till. But with police brutality remaining a problem in many African-American communities today, it’s appropriate to highlight an important – and unappreciated – story of the civil rights movement.

Why We Should Teach About the FBI’s War on the Civil Rights Movement

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Zinn Education Project
On March 8, 1971—while Muhammad Ali was fighting Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, and as millions sat glued to their TVs watching the bout unfold—a group of peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they could find. These documents revealed an FBI conspiracy—known as COINTELPRO—to disrupt and destroy a wide range of protest groups, including the Black freedom movement.

books

The Scholar Denied : W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Monica Bell Los Angeles Review of Books
This new book argues that W. E. B. Du Bois was the first of the USA's modern sociologists. Du Bois's empirically-based studies of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are models of sociological research. Aldon Morris details this legacy, which academic Sociology still does not universally acknowledge. In this review, Monica Bell considers the significance of Morris's argument.

The roots of the Chicago Freedom Movement

In September 1965 a dozen or so members of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s southern field staff moved into the West Side Christian Parish’s Project House in the heart of Chicago’s Near West Side, joining other volunteers already living there. Black and white, male and female, most of them still in their early twenties, they had already been tested by civil rights struggles in the South.

Black Culture and History Matter

Kirsten Mullen The American Prospect
It took 150 years after America officially abolished slavery to get a national museum on the black experience.

The Forgotten Way African Americans Stayed Safe in a Racist America

Ana Swanson The Washington Post
Jim Crow laws across the South mandated that restaurants, hotels, pool halls and parks strictly separate whites and blacks. Lynchings kept blacks in fear of mob violence. There were thousands of so-called “sundown towns,” which barred Blacks after dark with threats of violence. So in 1936, a postal worker named Victor Green began publishing a guide to help African American travelers find friendly restaurants, auto shops and accommodations in far-off places.
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