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The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the ...
In this engaging memoir, Hugh Price, former CEO of the National Urban League, recounts his amazing American life and ancestry.
African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans. These 1,000-3,000 word biographies, selected from over five thousand entries in the forthcoming eight-volume African American National Biography, illuminate African-American history through the immediacy of individual experience. From Esteban, the earliest known African to set foot in North America in 1528, right up to the continuing careers of Venus and Serena Williams, these stories of the renowned and the near forgotten give us a new view of American history. Our past is revealed from personal perspectives that in turn inspire, move, entertain, and even infuriate the reader. Subje...
Louisville's African-American community dates back to the early 1800s. Before the 1850s, many Black churches such as the Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church were founded in the area. Prominent African Americans, including Whitney M. Young, Woodford Porter, Frank Stanley, and Calvin Winstead, became Louisville's pioneer families in modern business and politics. Within the pages of this volume are many of the families who worked to become institution builders and leaders--in Louisville and around the world. African-American Life in Louisville covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s and focuses on the people and places in the Greater Louisville area, including Shelbyville. Author Bruce Tyler, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, Louisville, has created this unique collection of vintage photographs as a tribute to his community.
African Americans have experienced life under the rule of law in quite different contexts from those of whites, and they have written about those differences in poems, songs, stories, autobiographies, novels, and memoirs. This book examines the tradition of American law as it appears in African American literary life, from pre-Revolutionary murder trials to gangsta rap. The experience, and the critique it produces, changes our pictures of both American law and African American literature. This study reads the already canonical works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black literature in the context of their responses to and critiques of American legal history. At the same time, it examines...
A rich portrait of Black life in South Carolina's Upstate Encyclopedic in scope, yet intimate in detail, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont, 1780–1900, delves into the richness of community life in a setting where Black residents were relatively few, notably disadvantaged, but remarkably cohesive. W. J. Megginson shifts the conventional study of African Americans in South Carolina from the much-examined Lowcountry to a part of the state that offered a quite different existence for people of color. In Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties—occupying the state's northwest corner—he finds an independent, brave, and stable subculture that persevered for more than a ce...
In this exploration of the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, the author documents the variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked along the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century.
The chapters in this text comprise biographical sketches of previously unknown (or lesser known) African-Americans, among them General Daniel Chappie James Jr; William Levi Dawson (composer); Vinnette Carroll (director and playwright); and Elizabeth Ross Haynes (political speaker and activist).
From an early age, Bessie Coleman dreamed of flying, but racial bigotry and gender bias threatened to keep her grounded. Denied entrance to flight training school in the United States, Coleman went to Europe. She returned, triumphant, with a pilot's license and hopes of opening a flight school for African Americans. Author Connie Plantz captures all the tension and excitement of Coleman's soaring achievements. Raising funds as a stunt pilot, "Brave Bessie" thrilled her audiences with aerial tricks. Coleman's life ended in a tragic accident, but not before her dream of flight made aviation history.
Immerse Yourself in the Life and Times of the Nation's First Black ScientistBenjamin Banneker, celebrated today as the nation's first Black scientist and man of letters, was a largely self-taught mathematician, surveyor, and astronomer who came of age during America's revolutionary period. Silvio Bedini's acclaimed and definitive biography, The Life of Benjamin Banneker, is his story.Banneker was born a free Black in 1731 and quickly exhibited an extraordinary facility for mathematics. Through his study of astronomy, he accurately predicted the solar eclipse that occurred in 1789, but his true acclaim is based on the almanacs he published between 1792 and 1797, which contained tidal informat...