African Americans of Sanford have served in the building of this great nation since their participation in the three Seminole Wars. They were a large part of the labor force that earned Sanford the distinction of "Celery Capital of the World." The residents of Sanford and its surrounding communities of Goldsboro, Georgetown, Bookertown, and Midway/Canaan work tirelessly to nurture and protect their families. Their stories are a vital ingredient in Sanford's folklife performance, "Celery Soup." Crooms Academy gave service to African Americans in the area from its founding in 1926 until integration in the late 1960s and was the central force in connecting local communities. Its graduates have entered education, law, medicine, politics, engineering, entertainment, and other specialized areas. African Americans of Sanford recognizes and applauds those who have helped to preserve Sanford's history as well as those who have participated in making it.
African Americans of Sanford have served in the building of this great nation since their participation in the three Seminole Wars. They were a large part of the labor force that earned Sanford the distinction of "Celery Capital of the World." The residents of Sanford and its surrounding communities of Goldsboro, Georgetown, Bookertown, and Midway/Canaan work tirelessly to nurture and protect their families. Their stories are a vital ingredient in Sanford's folklife performance, "Celery Soup." Crooms Academy gave service to African Americans in the area from its founding in 1926 until integration in the late 1960s and was the central force in connecting local communities. Its graduates have entered education, law, medicine, politics, engineering, entertainment, and other specialized areas. African Americans of Sanford recognizes and applauds those who have helped to preserve Sanford's history as well as those who have participated in making it.
From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a life-long friendship across racial and class divides. A white woman’s necessary learning, and a Black woman’s complex evolution, make These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.” (Debby Irving, author, Waking Up White.) In the mid-1950s, a fifteen-year-old African American teenager named Mary White (now Mary Norman) traveled north from Virginia to work for twelve-year-old Wendy Sanford’s family as a live-in domestic for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Over the years, Wendy's family came to depend on Mary’s skilled service—and each summer, Mary endured the extreme loneliness of their elite white beachside retreat in order to support her family. As the Black “help” and the privileged white daughter, Mary and Wendy were not slated for friendship. But years later—each divorced, each a single parent, Mary now a rising officer in corrections and Wendy a feminist health activist—they began to walk the beach together after dark, talking about their children and their work, and a friendship began to grow. Based on decades’ worth of visits, phone calls, letters, and texts between Mary and Wendy, These Walls Between Us chronicles the two women’s friendship, with a focus on what Wendy characterizes as her “oft-stumbling efforts, as a white woman, to see Mary more fully and to become a more dependable friend.” The book examines obstacles created by Wendy’s upbringing in a narrow, white, upper-class world; reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers; and draws on classic works by the African American writers whose work informed and challenged Wendy along the way. Though Wendy is the work’s primary author, Mary read and commented on every draft—and together, the two friends hope their story will incite and support white readers to become more informed and accountable friends across the racial divides created by white supremacy and to become active in the ongoing movement for racial justice.
"Explores the life of Bill Pickett, the African-American cowboy who invented bulldogging, from his childhood in Texas to his life as a working cowboy to his career as a rodeo star"--Provided by publisher.
Culled from the records of the National Register of Historic Places, a roster of all types of significant properties across the United States, African American Historic Places includes over 800 places in 42 states and two U.S. territories that have played a role in black American history. Banks, cemeteries, clubs, colleges, forts, homes, hospitals, schools, and shops are but a few of the types of sites explored in this volume, which is an invaluable reference guide for researchers, historians, preservationists, and anyone interested in African American culture. Also included are eight insightful essays on the African American experience, from migration to the role of women, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. The authors represent academia, museums, historic preservation, and politics, and utilize the listed properties to vividly illustrate the role of communities and women, the forces of migration, the influence of the arts and heritage preservation, and the struggles for freedom and civil rights. Together they lead to a better understanding of the contributions of African Americans to American history. They illustrate the events and people, the designs and achievements that define African American history. And they pay powerful tribute to the spirit of black America.
Offers a complex reading of African Americans appearing on television in the 1960s and 1970s, finding within these programs opposition to white construction of African-American identity and the potential of television to effect social change and limitations.
In less than four months, beginning with a staff of five, an obscure office buried deep within the federal bureaucracy transformed the nation's hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions into our most integrated. These powerful private institutions, which had for a half century selectively served people on the basis of race and wealth, began equally caring for all on the basis of need. The book draws the reader into the struggles of the unsung heroes of the transformation, black medical leaders whose stubborn courage helped shape the larger civil rights movement. They demanded an end to federal subsidization of discrimination in the form of Medicare payments to hospitals that embraced the "separate but equal" creed that shaped American life during the Jim Crow era. Faced with this pressure, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations tried to play a cautious chess game, but that game led to perhaps the biggest gamble in the history of domestic policy. Leaders secretly recruited volunteer federal employees to serve as inspectors, and an invisible army of hospital workers and civil rights activists to work as agents, making it impossible for hospitals to get Medicare dollars with mere paper compliance. These triumphs did not come without casualties, yet the story offers lessons and hope for realizing this transformational dream.
“What I want to do is code-switch. To have there be layers of history and politics, but also this heady, arty stuff—inside jokes, black humor—that you might have to take a while to research if you want to really get it.”—Sanford Biggers Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) is a Harlem-based artist working in various media including painting, sculpture, video, and performance. He describes his practice as “code-switching”—mixing disparate elements to create layers of meaning—to account for his wide-ranging interests. This catalogue focuses on a series of repurposed quilts (many made in the 19th century) that embodies this interest in mixture. Informed by the significance of quilts to the Underground Railroad, Biggers transforms the quilts into new works using materials such as paint, tar, glitter, and charcoal to add his own layers of codes, whether they be historical, political, or purely artistic. Insightful essays survey Biggers’s career, his art in relation to music, and the history upon which the series draws. Also featured is a short yet powerful graphic essay by an award-winning illustrator that introduces the layered meanings inherent in the art and craft of quilting.
