Charlie Smith, a fifteen-year old negro sharecropper, fascinated by his grandfather's long-lost dream of playing golf befriends a young talented and Nationally ranked junior golfer.They both end up learning that their lives share similar interests despite their socioeconomic differences. A tragic turn of events happened that allowed the young sharecropper to display hidden talents that resurrected hopeful dreams and united a deprived county that had been left desolate due to hurricanes and drought. The two families that were once plagued by the same tragic event eventually find peace and an everlasting bond of friendship.
Winner of the 1999 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction A CBC Notable Children’s Book in the Field of Social Studies Two recently freed, formerly enslaved brothers work to protect the new life they’ve built during the Reconstruction after the Civil War in this vibrant, illustrated middle grade novel. Maybe nobody gave freedom, and nobody could take it away like they could take away a family farm. Maybe freedom was something you claimed for yourself. Like other ex-slaves, Pascal and his older brother Gideon have been promised forty acres and maybe a mule. With the found family they have built along the way, they claim a place of their own. Green Gloryland is the most wonderful place on earth, their own farm with a healthy cotton crop and plenty to eat. But the notorious night riders have plans to take it away, threatening to tear the beautiful freedom that the two boys are enjoying for the first time in their young lives.
If you are Black and live in America, this book is going to change your life In 40 Acres &a Mule, Kevin motivates you to start the process of wealth accumulations by follwing some very simple steps. He delves into how to set up your "real estate team." He also takes the covers off of the mortgage process. Kevin goes in to detail on how your credit scores are calculated adn how to "repair" your credit. Speaker, Motivator, Teacher, Entrepreneur have all been used to describe Kevin Riles. So READ, LEARN, ACT
The groundbreaking first book on black reparations, essential reading for the twenty-first century Originally published in 1972, Boris Bittker's riveting study of America's debt to African-Americans was well ahead of its time. Published by Toni Morrison when she was an editor, the book came from an unlikely source: Bittker was a white professor of law at Yale University who had long been ambivalent about the idea of reparations. Through his research into the history and theory of reparations-namely the development and enforcement of lawsdesigned to compensate groups for injustices imposed on them-he found that it wasn't a'crazy, far-fetched idea.' In fact, beginning with post-Civil War demands for forty acres and a mule, African-American thinkers have long made the case that compensatory measures are justified not only for the injury of slavery but for the further setbacks of almost a century of Jim Crow laws and forced school and job segregation, measures that effectively blocked African-Americans from enjoying the privledges of citizenship. The publication of important recent books by black scholars like Randall Robinson and the growth of a highly vocal reparations movement in the beginning of this century make this book, long unavailable, essential reading. Bittker carefully illuminates the historical provisions and statutes for legitimate claims to reparations, the national and international precedents for such claims, and most important, the obstacles to a national policy of reparations.
In the wake of recent successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have recently found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed group - Native Americans, holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s - Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations. As Hurricane Katrina made apparent, the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. Long Overdue provides an up-to-date survey of the political and legislative efforts that are now breaking the surface to move reparations into the heart of our national discussion about race.
From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period which shaped modern America, with a new introduction from the author. Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed. Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans. This "smart book of enormous strengths" (Boston Globe) remains the standard work on the wrenching post-Civil War period—an era whose legacy still reverberates in the United States today.
Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. This compelling and sharply argued book addresses economic injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War and offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. This new edition features a new foreword addressing the latest developments on the local, state, and federal level and considering current prospects for a comprehensive reparations program.
"Sarah Neidhardt grew up in the backwoods. She was an infant when her parents joined the back-to-the-land movement, uprooting their young family to move to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, where they built a cabin, grew crops, and for years strove to achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency. In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor. She retraces her parents' journey--from their affluent youth, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society--using a trove of family letters and archival research. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of their unconventional lives and offers a fresh perspective on what it means to aspire to a preindustrial life in the modern world"--
_____________ 'It is almost impossible not to fall under the spell of Eustace Conway ... his accomplishments, his joy and vigor, seem almost miraculous' - New York Times Review of Books 'Gilbert takes a bright-eyed bead on Eustace, hitting him square with a witty modernist appraisal of folkloric American masculinity' - The Times 'Conversational, enthusiastic, funny and sharp, the energy of The Last American Man never ebbs' - New Statesman _____________ A fascinating, intimate portrait of an endlessly complicated man: a visionary, a narcissist, a brilliant but flawed modern hero At the age of seventeen, Eustace Conway ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape to the wild. Away from the crushing disapproval of his father, he lived alone in a teepee in the mountains. Everything he needed he built, grew or killed. He made his clothes from deer he killed and skinned before using their sinew as sewing thread. But he didn't stop there. In the years that followed, he stopped at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder challenges. He travelled the Mississippi in a handmade wooden canoe; he walked the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail; he hiked across the German Alps in trainers; he scaled cliffs in New Zealand. One Christmas, he finished dinner with his family and promptly upped and left - to ride his horse across America. From South Carolina to the Pacific, with his little brother in tow, they dodged cars on the highways, ate road kill and slept on the hard ground. Now, more than twenty years on, Eustace is still in the mountains, residing in a thousand-acre forest where he teaches survival skills and attempts to instil in people a deeper appreciation of nature. But over time he has had to reconcile his ambitious dreams with the sobering realities of modernity. Told with Elizabeth Gilbert's trademark wit and spirit, The Last American Man is an unforgettable adventure story of an irrepressible life lived to the extreme. The Last American Man is a New York Times Notable Book and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity. Includes an 8-page photo insert featuring Kwame Ture with Dennis Banks and Russell Means at the Wounded Knee Trials; Angela Davis walking with Oren Lyons after he leaves Wounded Knee, SD; former South African president Nelson Mandela with Clyde Bellecourt; and more.
