When the Smoke Cleared

When the Smoke Cleared

Author: Kyla Sommers

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1620978105

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Echoing James Forman Jr.’s Locking Up Our Own, a riveting story of race, civil rights, and rebellion in Washington, DC In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation’s capital was shaken to its foundations. When the Smoke Cleared tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers’s revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC’s reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state. A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences—revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.


Democracy’s Capital

Democracy’s Capital

Author: Lauren Pearlman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1469653915

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From its 1790 founding until 1974, Washington, D.C.--capital of "the land of the free--lacked democratically elected city leadership. Fed up with governance dictated by white stakeholders, federal officials, and unelected representatives, local D.C. activists catalyzed a new phase of the fight for home rule. Amid the upheavals of the 1960s, they gave expression to the frustrations of black residents and wrestled for control of their city. Bringing together histories of the carceral and welfare states, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements, Lauren Pearlman narrates this struggle for self-determination in the nation's capital. She captures the transition from black protest to black political power under the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations and against the backdrop of local battles over the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. Through intense clashes over funds and programming, Washington residents pushed for greater participatory democracy and community control. However, the anticrime apparatus built by the Johnson and Nixon administrations curbed efforts to achieve true home rule. As Pearlman reveals, this conflict laid the foundation for the next fifty years of D.C. governance, connecting issues of civil rights, law and order, and urban renewal.


A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights

A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights

Author: Florence Ridlon

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2020-06

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0826333400

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Biography of Edward Mazique, respected physician, contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr., and influential Civil Rights activist in Washington, D.C.


The Ghost in the White House

The Ghost in the White House

Author: Gerald Stanley Lee

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-12-17

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13:

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"The Ghost in the White House" by Gerald Stanley Lee isn't your average ghost story. While, of course, there are tales of real hauntings in the White House, this story takes a look at a different sort of spirit. The spirit of the United States people, both past and present. The ghosts of these men, women, and children haunt the halls in an attempt to guide the president to do his sworn duty and lead the nation.


Power and Protest

Power and Protest

Author: Jeremi Suri

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005-04-15

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780674044166

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In a brilliantly conceived book, Jeremi Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. Profoundly disturbed by increasing social and political discontent, Cold War powers united on the international front, in the policy of detente. Though reflecting traditional balance of power considerations, detente thus also developed from a common urge for stability among leaders who by the late 1960s were worried about increasingly threatening domestic social activism. In the early part of the decade, Cold War pressures simultaneously inspired activists and constrained leaders; within a few years activism turned revolutionary on a global scale. Suri examines the decade through leaders and protesters on three continents, including Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He describes connections between policy and protest from the Berkeley riots to the Prague Spring, from the Paris strikes to massive unrest in Wuhan, China. Designed to protect the existing political order and repress movements for change, detente gradually isolated politics from the public. The growth of distrust and disillusion in nearly every society left a lasting legacy of global unrest, fragmentation, and unprecedented public skepticism toward authority.


The Devil's Triangle

The Devil's Triangle

Author: Mark Judge

Publisher: Bombardier Books

Published: 2022-11-28

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1637586817

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“Do you remember the woman in To Kill a Mockingbird who falsely accuses a black man of raping her? What could possess anyone to do such an evil thing—to viciously attempt to destroy a life by knowingly lying? For that answer look no farther than the riveting and gloriously candid The Devil’s Triangle by Mark Judge, who himself was targeted for destruction by that same evil, and who lived to tell the tale, if only so that we might all recognize the dark forces at work in our nation. In a voice evoking J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, and yes, Lester Bangs—within a narrative that brings to mind All the President’s Men and Fast Times at Ridgemont High—Judge tells us the truth, in all of its brutality and beauty. May this book open the way for a spate of similar memoirs, whose honesty will lead this once-great nation out of the fetid triangular swamp of lies that is this brave book’s eponymous Devil’s Triangle¾and toward a new sunlit frontier, in which genuine liberty and unvarnished truth once more become our beacons and our hope.” —Eric Metaxas, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life and Host of Socrates in the City In 2018, in the midst of a contentious Supreme Court confirmation battle, Christine Blasey Ford named Mark Judge as a witness to her alleged attempted rape over thirty years earlier at the hands of a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh. Overnight, the unassuming writer, critic, videographer, and recovering alcoholic was unwillingly thrust into the national media spotlight. Reporters combed through Judge’s writings, pored over his high school yearbook, hounded him with emails and phone calls, and invaded the privacy of his relatives, friends, and former girlfriends. He was mauled in the press, denounced in the Senate, received threatening late-night calls, became the target of a classic honey trap, and was even called out by Matt Damon on Saturday Night Live. As the lunacy reached its crescendo, Judge began to fear for his sanity⎯and even his life. A year later, still traumatized by this Kafkaesque experience, Judge found himself washing dishes in a Maryland restaurant, trying to piece his shattered life back together. Even at the time, it was clear that Judge himself was not the target of this campaign of vilification. Instead, it was an attempt to use his spotty record as a teenage alcoholic, and later, a political and cultural conservative, to destroy Brett Kavanaugh by proxy. The actors in this malicious and cynical plot were an informal cabal of partisan reporters, Democrats in Congress, and shadowy opposition researchers: a “Devil’s Triangle” whom Judge aptly compares to the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police who terrorized citizens during the Cold War. Now, in a frank, confessional, and deeply moving book that stands comparison to Arthur Koestler’s Cold War classic Darkness at Noon, Judge rips the mask from the new American Stasi. Using pop culture, politics, the story of his friendship with Kavanaugh, and the fun, wild, and misunderstood 1980s, Judge celebrates sex, art, and freedom while issuing a timely warning to the rest of us about our own endangered freedoms.