Wednesday, July 31, 2013

"Help Me to Find My People" is Nominated for Lillian Smith Book Award for 2013

The African American Search for
Family Lost in Slavery

 
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade.

Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
 

About the Author

 
Heather Andrea Williams is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.

Reviews

 
"Williams examines the historical fact of family separation and renders its emotional truth. She is the rare scholar who writes history with such tenderness that her words can bring a reader to tears. . . . [The book] has a propulsive narrative flow, and with each successive chapter the suppleness of Williams's prose grows."
--New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
 
“[A] fine new book. . . . A broadly ranging study. . . . Help Me to Find My People. . . provides opportunities for remembering that the continued existence of slavery for centuries depended on whites learning to rationalize guilty feelings by pretending (or even believing) that African Americans did not feel family separations deeply.”
--Women’s Review of Books
 
“[Williams] retraces the journey of freed African-Americans through one of their most harrowing experiences after emancipation--finding their family members.”
--Carolina Alumni Review
 
“William’s descriptions of scenes of mother and children being separated and sold to different owners are heartrending persuasion that the worst part of the horrible American system of slavery was not the backbreaking work.”
--North Carolina Bookwatch
 
“An excellent book. . . . [that] should be added to everyone’s library in the hope that these sad events will act as a constant reminder that we need to be kind and thoughtful to everyone as we are all Americans now.”
--Lone Star Book Review
 
"Williams speaks to scholars and to everyone interested in African American roots and family history as she delves into the short-run and long-run impact of family instability and disruption. This is a study of real importance."
--Michael Tadman, University of Liverpool

         
Join us for the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Awards Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

"The Land was Ours" is Nominated for Lillian Smith Book Award for 2013

The Land Was Ours:

African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South

 
 
Driving along the coasts of the American South, we see miles of luxury condominiums, timeshare resorts, and gated communities. Yet, a century ago, a surprising amount of beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shore, and around the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans. In a pathbreaking combination of social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl shows how the rise and fall of Jim Crow and the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt have transformed both communities and ecosystems along the southern seaboard.
 
Kahrl traces the history of these dynamic coastlines in all their incarnations, from unimproved marshlands to segregated beaches, from exclusive resorts for the black elite to campgrounds for religious revival. His careful reconstruction of African American life, labor, and leisure in small oceanside communities reveals the variety of ways African Americans pursued freedom and mobility through the land under their feet.
 
The Land Was Ours makes unexpected connections between two seemingly diverse topics: African Americans’ struggles for economic empowerment and the ecology of coastal lands. Kahrl’s innovative approach allows him fresh insights into the rise of African American consumers and the widespread campaigns to dispossess blacks of their property. His skillful portrayal of African American landowners and real-estate developers rescues the stories of these architects of the southern landscape from historical neglect. Ultimately, Kahrl offers readers a thoughtful, judicious appraisal of the ambiguous legacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.
 
Join us for the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Awards Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Monday, July 29, 2013

"Snow Storm in August" is Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

Snow Storm in August: 
The Struggle for Freedom and
Washington's Race Riot of 1835

By Jefferson Morley


A gripping narrative history of the explosive events that drew together Francis Scott Key, Andrew Jackson, and an 18-year-old slave on trial for attempted murder.

In 1835, the city of Washington pulsed with change. As newly freed African Americans from the South poured in, free blacks outnumbered slaves for the first time. Radical notions of abolishing slavery circulated on the city's streets, and white residents were forced to confront new ideas of what the nation's future might look like.

On the night of August 4th, Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-year-old slave, stumbled into the bedroom where his owner, Anna Thornton, slept. He had an ax in the crook of his arm. An alarm was raised, and he ran away. Word of the incident spread rapidly, and within days, Washington's first race riot exploded, as whites fearing a slave rebellion attacked the property of the free blacks. Residents dubbed the event the “Snow-Storm," in reference to the central role of Beverly Snow, a flamboyant former slave turned successful restaurateur, who became the target of the mob's rage.

In the wake of the riot came two sensational criminal trials that gripped the city. Prosecuting both cases was none other than Francis Scott Key, a politically ambitious attorney famous for writing the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who few now remember served as the city's district attorney for eight years. Key defended slavery until the twilight's last gleaming, and pandered to racial fears by seeking capital punishment for Arthur Bowen. But in a surprise twist his prosecution was thwarted by Arthur's ostensible victim, Anna Thornton, a respected socialite who sought the help of President Andrew Jackson.

Ranging beyond the familiar confines of the White House and the Capitol, Snow-Storm in August delivers readers into an unknown chapter of American history with a textured and absorbing account of the racial secrets and contradictions that coursed beneath the freewheeling capital of a rising world power.

 PRAISE

"A vibrant and illuminating picture of the antebellum capital at a time when national stability depended on placating the owners of slaves … Morley reveals a tangle of back stories that eventually lead deep into a tension-filled landscape of class resentments, provocative abolitionism and proslavery passions. It is a world peopled with vivid characters both black and white, among them, most intriguingly, the city's district attorney, Francis Scott Key." —The Wall Street Journal

"[Morley’s] plunge beneath the surface of history exposes realities more true to daily experience than executive proclamations or speeches in Congress ... Snow-Storm in August deepens our appreciation of how slavery made a mockery of the founding and made the Civil War as close to inevitable as any event in our history." —The Washington Post

"In a crackling good tale of the deep impact of race and politics on a young nation struggling to create its identity, Salon Washington correspondent Jefferson Morley boldly and elegantly recreates a moment in time when free black businessmen mingled with their white counterparts while proponents of slavery and abolitionists struggled to co-exist in the nation’s bustling capital." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Jefferson Morley has vividly and factually recreated a largely lost but pivotal time in Jacksonian Washington, an emerging, still somewhat primitive capital city where racial tensions among its complex mix of white, free black, and enslaved residents inevitably lead to violence and push the debate over abolition into the houses of Congress and the President. The historical characters, famous and forgotten, come to life in affecting and surprising ways without fictional artifice, a tribute to Morley's meticulous research and empathetic narrative style." —Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post

"Morley vividly recreates the episodes connected to the riot, and dramatically depicts the personalities involved, giving important insight into race relations before the Civil War." —The Columbus Dispatch
 
 
Join us for the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Awards Ceremony

During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Sunday, July 28, 2013

"The Amistad Rebellion An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" is Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

The Amistad RebellionOn June 28, 1839, the Spanish slave schooner Amistad set sail from Havana on a routine delivery of human cargo. On a moonless night, after four days at sea, the captive Africans rose up, killed the captain, and seized control of the ship. They attempted to sail to a safe port, but were captured by the U.S. Navy and thrown into jail in Connecticut. Their legal battle for freedom eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where their cause was argued by former president John Quincy Adams. In a landmark ruling, they were freed and eventually returned to Africa. The rebellion became one of the best-known events in the history of American slavery, celebrated as a triumph of the legal system in films and books, all reflecting the elite perspective of the judges, politicians, and abolitionists involved in the case. In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the rebellion for its true proponents: the African rebels who risked death to stake a claim for freedom.
 

 
Using newly discovered evidence, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. He reaches back to Africa to find the rebels’ roots, narrates their cataclysmic transatlantic journey, and unfolds a prison story of great drama and emotion. Featuring vividly drawn portraits of the Africans, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, he shows how the rebels captured the popular imagination and helped to inspire and build a movement that was part of a grand global struggle between slavery and freedom. The actions aboard the Amistad that July night and in the days and months that followed were pivotal events in American and Atlantic history, but not for the reasons we have always thought.
 
The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course to freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This stunning book honors their achievement.

Join Us for the Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

"Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer" is Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

Representing the Race tells the story of an enduring paradox of American race relations, through the prism of a collective biography of African American lawyers who worked in the era of segregation. Practicing the law and seeking justice for diverse clients, they confronted a tension between their racial identity as black men and women and their professional identity as lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that these attorneys stand apart from their racial community as members of the legal fraternity. Yet, at the same time, they were expected to be “authentic”—that is, in sympathy with the black masses. This conundrum, as Kenneth W. Mack shows, continues to reverberate through American politics today.
 
 
Mack reorients what we thought we knew about famous figures such as Thurgood Marshall, who rose to prominence by convincing local blacks and prominent whites that he was—as nearly as possible—one of them. But he also introduces a little-known cast of characters to the American racial narrative. These include Loren Miller, the biracial Los Angeles lawyer who, after learning in college that he was black, became a Marxist critic of his fellow black attorneys and ultimately a leading civil rights advocate; and Pauli Murray, a black woman who seemed neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, who helped invent sex discrimination as a category of law. The stories of these lawyers pose the unsettling question: what, ultimately, does it mean to “represent” a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?
 
Join us for the 2013 Awards Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

"The Nashville Way" is Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

The Nashville Way:
Racial Etiquette and the

Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City

By Benjamin Houston



Among Nashville’s many slogans, the one that best reflects its emphasis on manners and decorum is the Nashville Way, a phrase coined by boosters to tout what they viewed as the city’s amicable race relations. Benjamin Houston offers the first scholarly book on the history of civil rights in Nashville, providing new insights and critiques of this moderate progressivism for which the city has long been credited.

 
Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who came into their own in Nashville were devoted to nonviolent direct action, or what Houston calls the “black Nashville Way.” Through the dramatic story of Nashville’s 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, Houston shows how these activists used nonviolence to disrupt the coercive script of day-to-day race relations. Nonviolence brought the threat of its opposite—white violence—into stark contrast, revealing that the Nashville Way was actually built on a complex relationship between etiquette and brute force. Houston goes on to detail how racial etiquette forged in the era of Jim Crow was updated in the civil rights era. Combined with this updated racial etiquette, deeper structural forces of politics and urban renewal dictate racial realities to this day.
 
In The Nashville Way, Houston shows that white power was surprisingly adaptable. But the black Nashville Way also proved resilient as it was embraced by thousands of activists who continued to fight battles over schools, highway construction, and economic justice even after most Americans shifted their focus to southern hotspots like Birmingham and Memphis.
 
 
Reviews
 
 
“The civil rights saga of Nashville in the decades following World War II is a complicated and bittersweet story of struggle and resistance, change and continuity, success and disappointment; and Houston captures it all with a rich narrative of black and white southerners engaged in a historical drama of national and even international importance. The first book to offer a comprehensive and balanced study of the city’s distinctive racial and movement cultures, The Nashville Way fills an enormous gap in civil rights and southern historiography.”
 
—Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

“Houston’s book details the particular nature of the Nashville community and the way civil rights unfolded there but also adds to our understanding of the civil rights movement more broadly. It is engagingly written, even gripping at times, and its audience should include the educated bookbuying public in and around Nashville.”
 
—Tracy E. K’Meyer, author of Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980

 
Join Us for the Award Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Howard Zinn Biography Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left

By Martin Duberman
 
Howard Zinn was perhaps the best known and most widely celebrated popular interpreter of American history in the twentieth century, renowned as a bestselling author, a political activist, a lecturer, and one of America's most recognizable and admired progressive voices.
 
His rich, complicated, and fascinating life placed Zinn at the heart of the signal events of modern American history - from the battlefields of World War II to the McCarthy era - the civil rights and antiwar movements and beyond.  A bombardier who later renounced war, a son of working-class parents who earned a doctorate at Columbia, a white professor who taught at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, a committed scholar who will forever be remembered as a devoted "people's historian," Howard Zinn blazed a bold, iconoclastic path through the turbulent second half of the twentieth century. 
 
For the millions who were moved by Zinn's personal example of political engagement and by his inspiring "bottom up" history, here is an authoritative biography of this towering figure - by Martin Duberman, recipient of the American Historical Association's 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award.   Given exclusive access to the previously closed Zinn archives, Duberman's impeccably researched biography is illustrated with never-before-published photos from the Zinn family collection.  Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left is a major publishing event that brings to life one of the most inspiring figures of our time.
 
Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the CUNY Graduate School, where he founded and for a decade directed the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.  The author of more than twenty books, Duberman has won a Bancroft Prize and been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Join us for the 2013 Awards Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

 

Thursday, July 18, 2013

"Multiplication is for White People" Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

By Lisa Delpit

"Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. Lisa?
Black people don't multiply.
Black people just add and subtract."
-From Multiplication is for White People

As MacArthur award-winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us—and as all research shows—there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform.

Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication is for White People", Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them.

In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people's children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone.

MacArthur "genius" award winner Lisa Delpit's article on "Other People's Children" for Harvard Magazine was the single most requested reprint in the magazine's history following its publication. Delpit expanded her ideas into  a groundbreaking book with the same name, which won a Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association, Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Title award, and was voted one of Teacher Magazine's "great books." A recipient of the Harvard School of Education's award for an Outstanding Contribution to Education, she is dedicated to providing excellent education to communities both in the United States and abroad. She is a co-editor of The Real Ebonics Debate, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, and The Skin That We Speak (The New Press). Currently the Felton G. Clark Professor of Education at Southern University, she lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Join Us for the Award Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013

"Multiplication is for White People" Nominated for 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award

Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

By Lisa Delpit

"Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. Lisa?
Black people don't multiply.
Black people just add and subtract."
-From Multiplication is for White People

As MacArthur award-winning educator Lisa Delpit reminds us—and as all research shows—there is no achievement gap at birth. In her long-awaited second book, Delpit presents a striking picture of the elements of contemporary public education that conspire against the prospects for poor children of color, creating a persistent gap in achievement during the school years that has eluded several decades of reform.

Delpit's bestselling and paradigm-shifting first book, Other People's Children, focused on cultural slippage in the classroom between white teachers and students of color. Now, in "Multiplication is for White People", Delpit reflects on two decades of reform efforts—including No Child Left Behind, standardized testing, the creation of alternative teacher certification paths, and the charter school movement—that have still left a generation of poor children of color feeling that higher educational achievement isn't for them.

In chapters covering primary, middle, and high school, as well as college, Delpit concludes that it's not that difficult to explain the persistence of the achievement gap. In her wonderful trademark style, punctuated with telling classroom anecdotes and informed by time spent at dozens of schools across the country, Delpit outlines an inspiring and uplifting blueprint for raising expectations for other people's children, based on the simple premise that multiplication—and every aspect of advanced education—is for everyone.

MacArthur "genius" award winner Lisa Delpit's article on "Other People's Children" for Harvard Magazine was the single most requested reprint in the magazine's history following its publication. Delpit expanded her ideas into  a groundbreaking book with the same name, which won a Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association, Choice magazine's Outstanding Academic Title award, and was voted one of Teacher Magazine's "great books." A recipient of the Harvard School of Education's award for an Outstanding Contribution to Education, she is dedicated to providing excellent education to communities both in the United States and abroad. She is a co-editor of The Real Ebonics Debate, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, and The Skin That We Speak (The New Press). Currently the Felton G. Clark Professor of Education at Southern University, she lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Join Us for the Award Ceremony
During the Decatur Book Festival
September 1, 2013