In the wake of yet another set of police killings of black men, Michael Eric Dyson wrote a tell-it-straight, no-holds-barred piece for the NYT: "Death in Black and White." The response has been overwhelming.
Beyoncé and Isabel Wilkerson tweeted it, JJ Abrams, among many other prominent people, wrote him a long fan letter. The NYT closed the comments section after 2,500 responses, and Dyson has been on NPR, BBC, and CNN non-stop since then.
Fifty years ago Malcolm X told a white woman who asked what she could do for the cause, "Nothing." Dyson believes he was wrong. In Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, he responds to that question.
If we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted.
As Dyson writes, "At birth you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy. Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead... The problem is you do not want to know anything different from what you think you know... You think we have been handed everything because we fought your selfish insistence that the world, all of it - all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace - should be yours first and foremost, and if there's anything left, why then we can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully."
Short, emotional, literary, and powerful, in the tradition of The Fire Next Time, this is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long burning crisis in race relations need to read.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
The Coretta Scott King Honor-winning author of Beautiful Moon: A Child's Prayer presents a tribute to 16 diverse Americans of African descent who helped define history in the 18th through 20th centuries, including Allen Allensworth, Sissieretta Jones and Maggie Lena Walker.
Over the centuries, untold numbers of black men and women in America have achieved great things against the odds.
Pathfinders: The Journeys of 16 Extraordinary Black Souls is a collective biography of sixteen diverse American men and women of African descent who made their mark on American history in the 18th to 20th centuries. People who dared to dream, take risks, and create goals not only for themselves, but for others and the betterment of their society, too.
Award-winning author Tonya Bolden offers an insightful look at these figures, from Venture Smith, who bought his freedom; to Sadie Alexander, who contributed to the Civil Rights movement in the United States; to Katherine Johnson, who helped the United States land on the moon.
Among the incredible people in this nonfiction masterpiece are James Forten (1766–1842), a powder boy then prisoner of war during the Revolution, who grew up to be the captain of his own ship and one of Philadelphia's leading abolitionists and wealthiest citizen; Richard Potter (1783-1835), an accomplished magician, ventriloquist, and hypnotist who paved the way for other well-known entertainers like Harry Houdini; Paul Revere Williams (1894–1980), born poor and an orphan by age four, who became known as the "Architect to the Stars" (among them Danny Thomas); Jackie Ormes (1911–1985), who first made her mark as a cartoonist in the 1930s; and Katherine Johnson (1918), a mathematician and physicist whose calculations were key to the successful missions of astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong.
Each evocative profile includes an enlightening look at the historical build up and several images ranging from paintings and photographs to primary documents.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
James Meredith's 1966 march in Mississippi began as one man's peaceful protest for voter registration and became one of the South's most important demonstrations of the civil rights movement.
It brought together leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael, who formed an unlikely alliance that resulted in the Black Power movement, which ushered in a new era in the fight for equality.
The retelling of Meredith's story opens on the day of his assassination attempt and goes back in time to recount the moments leading up to that event and its aftermath. Readers learn about the powerful figures and emerging leaders who joined the over 200-mile walk that became known as the "The March Against Hate."
Thoughtfully presented by award-winning author Ann Bausum, The March Against Fear: The Last Great Walk of the Civil Rights Movement and the Emergence of Black Power helps readers understand the complex issues of fear, injustice, and the challenges of change.
It is a history lesson that's as important and relevant today as it was 50 years ago.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Bestselling author and journalist Kitty Kelley combines her elegant storytelling with Stanley Tretick's iconic photographs to transport young readers to the 1963 March on Washington, bringing that historic day vividly to life for a new generation.
Martin Luther King Jr. was nervous.
Standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, he was about to address 250,000 people with what would become known as his "I Have a Dream Speech" - the most famous speech of his life.
That day - August 28, 1963 - was a momentous day in the Civil Rights Movement. It was the culmination of years spent leading marches, sit-ins, and boycotts across the South to bring attention to the plight of African Americans.
Years spent demanding equality for all. Years spent dreaming of the day that black people would have the same rights as white people, and would be treated with the same dignity and respect.
In Martin's Dream Day, it was time for Martin to share his dream.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
This is a history of America's stand-your-ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin.
In the aftermath of the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, conservative legislators and school administrators shocked some observers when they proposed armed "public school patrols" to protect children.
Yet this kind of "DIY security" activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement. As Caroline Light proves, support for "good guys with guns" relies on the entrenched belief that certain "bad guys with guns" threaten us all.
Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair With Lethal Self-Defense explores the development of the American right to "self-defense," and reveals how the "duty to retreat" from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill.
In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America's attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense, from the original "castle laws" to the radicalization of the NRA.
A convincing treatise on the United States' deadly ascension as the world's first stand-your-ground nation, Light shows how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and made the most marginalized more vulnerable.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
From 1927 until his death in 1979, E.F. Joseph documented the daily lives of African Americans in the Bay Area.
E. F. Joseph's images were printed in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender but not widely published in his home community.
A graduate of the American School of Photography in Illinois, Joseph photographed the likes of such celebrities and activists as Josephine Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurgood Marshall.
However, what is perhaps more compelling within The Picture Man: From the Collection of Bay Area Photographer E. F. Joseph, 1927-1979 is the countless images of everyday citizens - teaching, entertaining, worshipping, working, and serving their community and their nation.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this book provides a comprehensive look at this MacArthur Fellows–winning artist's ongoing exploration of the African-American experience.
Whitfield Lovell: Kin centers on a sumptuously reproduced portfolio of the artist's Kin series, in which images of anonymous African-Americans are paired with found objects evoking their personalities and experiences.
Tangible presences that powerfully connect with the viewer, Lovell's works invoke issues of cultural heritage and personal identity as they imaginatively reflect the lives of forgotten Americans. Also included are the artist's large-scale installations and works from the 1980s and early 1990s.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Baseball star Richie "Dick" Allen forced Philadelphians to address the racism that existed in their city during the 1960s.
While his candid opinions challenged the white baseball establishment, Allen’s tape-measure home runs earned the admiration of younger fans and fellow players, both black and white.
The admiration, as well as Allen's reputation as "Baseball's Bad Boy," continued after he left Philadelphia to play for the St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago White Sox. Named the American League's Most Valuable player in 1972, Allen was one of the game's most misunderstood players.
Based on interviews of teammates, family, friends, and Allen himself, this richly illustrated biography with original artwork by Dick Perez explores the star's personal life as well as his playing career. Dick Allen, the Life and Times of a Baseball Immortal: An Illustrated Biography is a story about one of the finest baseball players of all time, and one who deserves to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
James Beard award–winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington.
Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history. Daisy McAfee Bonner, for example, FDR's cook at his Warm Springs retreat, described the president's final day on earth in 1945; he was struck down just as his lunchtime cheese souffle emerged from the oven.
Sorrowfully, but with a cook's pride, she recalled, "He never ate that souffle, but it never fell until the minute he died."
A treasury of information about cooking techniques and equipment, The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas includes twenty recipes for which black chefs were celebrated. From Samuel Fraunces's "onions done in the Brazilian way" for George Washington to Zephyr Wright's popovers, beloved by LBJ's family, Miller highlights African Americans' contributions to our shared American foodways.
Surveying the labor of enslaved people during the antebellum period and the gradual opening of employment after Emancipation, Miller highlights how food-related work slowly became professionalized and the important part African Americans played in that process. His chronicle of the daily table in the White House proclaims a fascinating new American story.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Can it ever get better? This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking.
In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide - in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider - is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white?
An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day.
Now, in Under Our Skin: Getting Real About Race - Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations That Divide Us, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Wilson Pickett was arguably the greatest male soul screamer of the 1960s and '70s.
With a career spanning half a decade, he sold millions of albums and tens of millions of singles, leaving a legacy of unforgettable hits, including "In the Midnight Hour," "Land of 1,000 Dances," and "Mustang Sally." A first ballot inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Pickett collaborated with some of the biggest names in '60s and '70s pop, rock, and soul, and his passionate stage performances frequently garnered invasions by frenzied audience members of all colors eager to bask-and dance-in his radiant aura. A musician of rare intelligence with an unmistakable intensity and charisma, the 'Wicked' Pickett was for many the living embodiment of soul.
In the first biography of this legendary artist, veteran music journalist Tony Fletcher goes far beyond anecdote, weaving the turns of Pickett's extraordinary career into the larger a story of black American music in the late 20th Century. As Fletcher shows, from his childhood in the gospel-rich cotton fields of Alabama to his early career in pre-Motown Detroit and long tenure at Atlantic Records, Wilson Pickett always positioned himself at the cutting edge of rhythm 'n' blues and soul.
By the time he was thirty, Pickett had penned five #1 R&B hits, rubbed shoulders with the likes of James Brown, Otis Redding and the Who, and traveled to Ghana with Tina Turner to headline the first ever American popular music package to visit the continent. As with so many artists of his generation, the price of superstardom was a career punctuated by violence and drug abuse, with fits of erratic and wild behavior leading to a career slump and two jail terms in the late 70s.
Drawn from extensive interviews with the singer's close family and friends and regular members of his studio and touring band, In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett is both a narrative portrait of one of the greatest voices of soul and a rare window into the social upheavals that surrounded him, the genre he helped shape along the way, and the pitfalls of the fame that success brought him.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
According to recent surveys and studies, race relations in the United States are the worst they've been since the 1990s, and many would argue that life for most minorities has not significantly improved since the civil rights era of the 1960s. For so many, the dream of true equality has dissolved into a reality of prejudice, fear, and violence as a way of life.
John M. Perkins has been there from the beginning. Raised by his sharecropping grandparents, Perkins fled Mississippi in 1947 after his brother was fatally shot by a police officer. He led voter registration efforts in 1964, worked for school desegregation in 1967, and was imprisoned and tortured in 1970. Through it all, he has remained determined to seek justice and reconciliation based in Christ's redemptive work.
"Justice is something that every generation has to strive for," he says.
Despite the setbacks of recent years, Perkins finds hope in the young people he has met all across the nation who are hard at work, bringing about reconciliation in God's name and offering acceptance to all.
Dream With Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win is his look back at a life devoted to seeking justice for all God's people, as well as a look forward to what he sees as a potentially historic breakthrough for people of every race.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Okey Ndibe's funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the influential—but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency - African Commentary magazine.
Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American recounts stories of Ndibe's relationships with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary figures; examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the US, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice-versa); and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery.
All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A powerful biography of the nation's leading African American civil rights attorney in the 1960s and 1970s connects the details of his life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law.
Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation's leading African American civil rights attorney.
Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked to advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.
In the biography Julius Chambers: A Life in the Legal Struggle for Civil Rights, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect the details of Chambers's life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel's lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, they reveal Chambers's singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense.
Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as "buffalo soldiers" played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West.
This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past.
Now, 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the "Stars and Stripes" to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John "Black Jack" Pershing.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.
Escorted through the South's parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter's series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America's system of apartheid.
Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin's similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle's intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.
In 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle's groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
What do you think of when you hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they "Uncle Toms" or "sellouts," serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party?
Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported "post-racial" context of US politics.
Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African American's membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles.
We learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A groundbreaking book - two decades in the works - The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice tells the story of how a brilliant writer-turned-activist, granddaughter of a mulatto slave, and the first lady of the United States, whose ancestry gave her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, forged an enduring friendship that changed each of their lives and helped to alter the course of race and racism in America.
Pauli Murray first saw Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933, at the height of the Depression, at a government-sponsored, two-hundred-acre camp for unemployed women where Murray was living, something the first lady had pushed her husband to set up in her effort to do what she could for working women and the poor. The first lady appeared one day unannounced, behind the wheel of her car, her secretary and a Secret Service agent her passengers. To Murray, then aged twenty-three, Roosevelt’s self-assurance was a symbol of women’s independence, a symbol that endured throughout Murray's life.
Five years later, Pauli Murray, a 28-year-old aspiring writer, wrote a letter to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt protesting racial segregation in the South. The president’s staff forwarded Murray's letter to the federal Office of Education. The first lady wrote back.
So began a friendship between Pauli Murray (poet, intellectual rebel, principal strategist in the fight to preserve Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cofounder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African American female Episcopal priest) and Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady of the United States, later first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women) that would last for a quarter of a century.
Drawing on letters, journals, diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and interviews, Patricia Bell-Scott gives us the first close-up portrait of this evolving friendship and how it was sustained over time, what each gave to the other, and how their friendship changed the cause of American social justice.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in Americas space program and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.
Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as Human Computers, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women.
Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these colored computers, as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support Americas fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.
Moving from World War II through NASAs golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the womens rights movement, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the worldand whose lives show how out of one of Americas most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
The rising U.S. Senator and former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker relates candid stories from his life and career to outline a case for emphasizing connection and compassion to guide the nation toward a better future.
Widely recognized as the accessible and energetic new voice of politics, United States Senator Cory Booker makes the case that the virtues of connection and compassion must guide our nation toward a brighter future.
In United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good, Booker sounds a stirring call to reorient our civic discourse around the principles of empathy and solidarity.
Telling candid, inspiring stories from his life and career, and imparting lessons learned from people who motivated him to serve, he speaks of rising above discord, tending to our shared resources, and embracing our common destiny.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
As the Black Lives Matter movement gains momentum, and books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric swing national attention toward the racism and violence that continue to poison our communities, it's as urgent now as ever to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., whose insistence on equality and peace defined the Civil Rights Movement and forever changed the course of American history.
This collection ranges from an early 1961 interview in which King describes his reasons for joining the ministry (after considering medicine), to a 1964 conversation with Robert Penn Warren, to his last interview, which was conducted on stage at the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, just ten days before King's assassination.
Timely, poignant, and inspiring, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an essential addition to the Last Interview series.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Never before available, this is the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin
"I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only."
When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin's brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything - Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer's last chance to speak at length about his life and work.
James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin's career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.
Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin's life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin's fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Author Matthew F. Delmont examines how Alex Haley's 1976 book became a culture-shifting phenomenon that changed the way Americans viewed slavery.
When Alex Haley's book Roots was published by Doubleday in 1976, it became an immediate bestseller. The television series, broadcast by ABC in 1977, became the most popular miniseries of all time, captivating over a hundred million Americans. For the first time, Americans saw slavery as an integral part of the nation's history. With a remake of the series in 2016 by A&E Networks, Roots has again entered the national conversation.
In Making Roots: A Nation Captivated, Delmont looks at the importance, contradictions, and limitations of mass culture and examines how Roots pushed the boundaries of history.
Delmont investigates the decisions that led Alex Haley, Doubleday, and ABC to invest in the story of Kunta Kinte, uncovering how Haley's original, modest book proposal developed into an unprecedented cultural phenomenon.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Author Jesse Holland presents a history of African American slaves who served in the White House from the time of George Washington up until the Civil War, discussing their daily lives and the sometimes conflicted relationships they had with the President and his family.
The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House chronicles the African American presence inside the White House from its beginnings in 1782 until 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that granted slaves their freedom.
During these years, slaves were the only African Americans to whom the most powerful men in the United States were exposed on a daily, and familiar, basis.
By reading about these often-intimate relationships, readers will better understand some of the views that various presidents held about class and race in American society, and how these slaves contributed not only to the life and comforts of the presidents they served, but to America as a whole.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Daina Ramey Berry presents a groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America.
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including from before birth to after death—in the American domestic slave trades.
Covering the full "life cycle" (including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death), historian Daina Berry shows the lengths to which slaveholders would go to maximize profits. She draws from over ten years of research to explore how enslaved people responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold..
By illuminating their lives, Berry ensures that the individuals she studies are regarded as people, not merely commodities. Analyzing the depth of this monetization of human property will change the way we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, and nineteenth-century medical education.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
On September 15, 1963, a Klan-planted bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Fourteen-year-old Carolyn Maull was just a few feet away when the bomb exploded, killing four of her friends in the girl's restroom she had just exited. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history... and the turning point in a young girl's life.
While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age During the Civil Rights Movement is a poignant and gripping eyewitness account of life in the Jim Crow South: from the bombings, riots, and assassinations to the historic marches and triumphs that characterized the Civil Rights movement.
A uniquely moving exploration of how racial relations have evolved over the past five decades, While the World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry is an incredible testament to how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A proper understanding of race relations in this country must include a solid knowledge of Jim Crow - how it emerged, what it was like, how it ended, and its impact on the culture.
Understanding Jim Crow: Using Racist Memorabilia to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than 10,000 contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism.
The items are offensive, and they were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize Blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive - and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged.
The museum and this book exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race.
Fully illustrated, and with context provided by the museum's founder and director David Pilgrim, Understanding Jim Crow is both a grisly tour through America's past and an auspicious starting point for racial understanding and healing.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Dream A World Anew is the stunning gift book accompanying the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
It combines informative narratives from leading scholars, curators, and authors with objects from the museum's collection to present a thorough exploration of African American history and culture.
The first half of the book bridges a major gap in our national memory by examining a wide arc of African American history, from Slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Migrations through Segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and beyond. The second half of the book celebrates African American creativity and cultural expressions through art, dance, theater, and literature. Sidebars and profiles of influential figures - including Harriet Tubman, Robert Smalls, Ida B. Wells, Mordecai Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, and many others - provide additional context and interest throughout the book.
Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and the Shaping of America is a powerful book that provides an opportunity to explore and revel in African American history and culture, as well as the chance to see how central African American history is for all Americans.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
