Lane offers a historical explanation for rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during a paradoxical era. Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture traceable from its formative years. The author charts Philadelphia's story but also makes suggestions about national and international patterns.
1919, The Year of Racial Violence recounts African Americans' brave stand against a cascade of mob attacks in the United States after World War I. The emerging New Negro identity, which prized unflinching resistance to second-class citizenship, further inspired veterans and their fellow black citizens. In city after city - Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston; and elsewhere - black men and women took up arms to repel mobs that used lynching, assaults, and other forms of violence to protect white supremacy; yet, authorities blamed blacks for the violence, leading to mass arrests and misleading news coverage. Refusing to yield, African Americans sought accuracy and fairness in the courts of public opinion and the law. This is the first account of this three-front fight - in the streets, in the press, and in the courts - against mob violence during one of the worst years of racial conflict in US history.
Gathering together scholars from across the social sciences, Black Family Violence is one of the first books to chart new courses for research, while simultaneously serving as a fundamental introduction to family relationship issues in the study of black family life.
What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. Simmons argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity. Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, police reports, girls' fiction writing, and photography to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, "respectable" families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.
"The main thesis posits that the operational existence of Black-on-Black violence in the U.S. is psychologically and economically mandated by a white-dominated status quo. The criminalization of the Black American male is a psycho-politically engineered process designed to maintain the dependency and relative powerlessness of the African -American and Pan-African communities. It moves far beyond blaming the offending party toward an exposure of the psycho-social and intra-psychical dynamics of black-on-black criminality. Wilson contends that though this violence is orchestrated by white America's need to maintain its oppressive domination of black America, its ending is the primary responsibility of blacks here and abroad"--
"Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. Despite the trauma it could incur, many African Americans opted to publicize their experiences by testifying about the violence they endured and witnessed." "In this evocative and deeply moving history, Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence that federal officials and the American people would be inspired bear witness to thier suffering and support their demands for justice. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement." -- Book Cover.
Break the silence surrounding Black women's experiences of violence! Written from a Black feminist perspective by therapists, researchers, activists, and survivors, Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue sheds new light on an understudied field. For too long, Black women have been suffering the effects of violence in painful silence. This book—winner of the Carolyn Payton Early Career Award for its contribution to the understanding of the role of gender in the lives of Black women—provides a forum where personal testimony and academic research meet to show you how living at the intersection of many kinds of oppression shapes the lives of Black women. With moving case studies, in-depth discussions of activism and resistance, and helpful suggestions for treatment and intervention, this book will help you understand the impact of violence on the lives of Black women. Topics you'll find in Violence in the Lives of Black Women include: using the arts to deal with sexual aggression in the Black community racial aspects of sexual harassment the consequences of head and brain injuries stemming from abuse domestic violence in African-American lesbian relationships strategies Black women use to escape violent living situations lifelong effects of childhood sexual abuse on Black women's mental health references and resources to help you learn more!
Black Male Violence in Perspective examines the psychosocial dynamic of violence relative to African-American men, as it is inextricably tied to the history of violence in America including colonialism, expansionism, and concepts of manifest destiny. Tony Jackson articulates the need for intervention models based in African cultural paradigms.
Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.