On Her Own Ground
On Her Own Ground

Author: A'Lelia Bundles

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0743431723

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Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

Madam C. J. Walker
Madam C. J. Walker

Author: Erica L. Ball

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-01-29

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1442260394

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"[An] exhaustively detailed account of the life of Madam C.J. Walker." Booklist, Starred Review Madam C. J. Walker—reputed to be America’s first self-made woman millionaire—has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough to own a country estate near the Rockefellers in the prestigious New York town of Irvington-on-Hudson. In this biography, Erica Ball places this remarkable and largely forgotten life story in the context of Walker’s times. Ball analyzes Walker’s remarkable acts of self-fashioning, and explores the ways that Walker (and the Walker brand) enabled a new generation of African Americans to bridge the gap between a nineteenth-century agrarian past and a twentieth-century future as urban-dwelling consumers.

Upbuilding Black Durham
Upbuilding Black Durham

Author: Leslie Brown

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-11-17

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0807877530

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In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post-Civil War liberation community into the "capital of the black middle class." African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Leslie Brown animates the history of this remarkable city from emancipation to the civil rights era, as freedpeople and their descendants struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom. Brown paints Durham in the Jim Crow era as a place of dynamic change where despite common aspirations, gender and class conflicts emerged. Placing African American women at the center of the story, Brown describes how black Durham's multiple constituencies experienced a range of social conditions. Shifting the historical perspective away from seeing solidarity as essential to effective struggle or viewing dissent as a measure of weakness, Brown demonstrates that friction among African Americans generated rather than depleted energy, sparking many activist initiatives on behalf of the black community.

The Upswing
The Upswing

Author: Robert D. Putnam

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 198212914X

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From the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids, a “sweeping yet remarkably accessible” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis that “offers superb, often counterintuitive insights” (The New York Times) to demonstrate how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation. Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.

Ambiguous Pleasures
Ambiguous Pleasures

Author: Rachel Spronk

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0857454781

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Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

Nannie Helen Burroughs
Nannie Helen Burroughs

Author: Nannie Helen Burroughs

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-05-31

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0268105553

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This volume brings together the writings of Nannie Helen Burroughs, an educator, civil rights activist, and leading voice in the African American community during the first half of the twentieth century. Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has long been excluded from the literary canon. In her time, Burroughs was a celebrated African American (or, in her era, a "race woman") female activist, educator, and intellectual. This book represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. This anthology of her works written between 1900 and 1959 encapsulates Burroughs's work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist, as well as the myriad of ways that her career resisted definition. Burroughs rubbed elbows with such African American historical icons as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and these interactions represent much of the existing, easily available literature on Burroughs's life. This book aims to spark a conversation surrounding Burroughs's life and work by making available her own tracts on God, sin, the intersections of church and society, black womanhood, education, and social justice. Moreover, the volume is an important piece of the growing movement toward excavating African American intellectual and philosophical thought and reformulating the literary canon to bring a diverse array of voices to the table.

To Comfort a King
To Comfort a King

Author: Debbie Gilliland

Publisher: Ambassador-Emerald International

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781620202746

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"When Abishag leaves her home to fulfill the commission to comfort King David during his final months of life, she leaves behind a deaf sister, a small brother, and a father who is still grieving the death of his wife. Torn from the comfort of her small village, Abishag is thrust into a world of unfamiliar customs, royal expectations, and palace intrigue. She is greeted suspiciously by the king's concubines, warmly by Queen Bathsheba, and reluctantly by King David himself. Suffering personal losses, as well as scorn from much of the royal court, Abishag begins to question God's goodness in placing her in the king's service. Can she find someone there who understands that one who comforts the king is in great need of comfort herself? Will Abishag's time with the king end in despair or joy?"--Page 4 of cover.

Black Queer Freedom
Black Queer Freedom

Author: GerShun Avilez

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2020-11-09

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0252052250

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Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists’ work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces—specifically prisons and hospitals—and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.

Black No More
Black No More

Author: George S. Schuyler

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-03-08

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0486147746

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A satirical approach to debunking the myths of white supremacy and racial purity, this 1931 novel recounts the consequences of a mysterious scientific process that transforms black people into whites.

Beautiful March
Beautiful March

Author: Christy Pastore

Publisher:

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9781096434504

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Getting dumped sucks. Getting dumped by your boyfriend days before your best friend's wedding? It doesn't get much worse.Did I mention that the guy who cut me loose was country music's number one rising star?And my client.I thought I was walking into a proposal. Instead, I crashed right into humiliation--dumped and fired.The silver lining? In a restaurant, there's plenty of wine to drown my feelings.In strolls Tyler Nichols, the restaurant owner. He's charming, handsome and does a good job of trying to make me feel better. A really good job. Sharing my heartbreak with a beautiful stranger is the last thing that I expected.Turns out, Tyler Nichols is my ex's best friend. And according to the local gossips--mainly my cousin--he's got a mysterious past.No worries, I'm the gal with everything going for her--great job, fabulous apartment and a glamorous life half way across the country in sunny Los Angeles--far away from my hometown and my family's bourbon empire. I'll be leaving after the weekend wedding festivities.That is until my best friend, Sage, finds herself in a jam and needs my help before jetting off on her honeymoon.So, I'm staying in Mayfield a little longer than anticipated. In just a few short weeks, I'll march my happy ass back to the West Coast, far away from Tyler's smoldering gaze and his panty-melting smile. And the chemistry between us that burns hotter than a hickory stump.But the longer I'm in town, the harder it is to stay away from him. And maybe I don't want to.