Dr. Sam, Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend
Dr. Sam, Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend

Author: Samuel E. Kelly

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 029580081X

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When he was seventeen, Sam Kelly met Paul Robeson, who asked him, “What are you doing for the race?” That question became a challenge to the young Kelly and inspired him to devote his life to helping others. Sam Kelly’s story intersects with major developments in twentieth-century African American history, from the rich culture of the Harlem Renaissance and the integration of the U.S. Army to the civil rights movement and the political turmoil of the 1960s. Kelly recounts his childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, and his visits to Harlem. He describes his rise from army private to second lieutenant between 1944 and 1945, his bitter encounters with racism while wearing his army uniform in the South, his participation in the U.S. occupation of Japan, and his role in the desegregation of the army in 1948. In his rise to colonel, Kelly was a training and operations officer who helped create the post–Korean War rapid-response deployment army that would later fight in Vietnam and Iraq. As an educator, Dr. Sam earned the respect of the Black Panthers who took his African American history courses. In 1970, he became the first vice president for the Office of Minority Affairs and the first major African American administrator at the University of Washington. For six years, he led one of the strongest programs in the nation dedicated to integrating students of color at a major university. After retiring from the University of Washington at the age of sixty-five, Dr. Sam continued his work for black Americans by beginning a new career as a teacher and administrator at an alternative high school in Portland, Oregon. This remarkable book shares the difficulties in his personal life, including the birth of his special needs son, Billy; the unsuccessful struggle of his wife, Joyce, against breast cancer; and the challenges facing an interracial family. Before he died in 2009, he was proud to witness the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president, a fulfillment of his lifelong dream that the nation would recognize the rights and dignity of all citizens. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udknuKbOmnE

Freedom's Racial Frontier
Freedom's Racial Frontier

Author: Herbert G. Ruffin

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0806161248

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Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship. The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West. The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.

Washington State Rising
Washington State Rising

Author: Marc Arsell Robinson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 147981041X

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Documents the origins, actions, and impacts of the Black Student Union in the state of Washington during the tumultuous late 1960s. Washington State Rising documents the origins, actions, and impact of the Black Student Union (BSU) in Washington from 1967 to 1970. The BSU was a politicized student organization that had chapters across the West Coast and played a prominent role in the student wing of the Black Power Movement. Through accounts of Black student struggles at two different college campuses in Washington, one urban and one rural, Marc Arsell Robinson details how the BSU led highly consequential protest campaigns at both institutions and beyond, which led to reforms such as the establishment of Black Studies programs, increased hiring of Black faculty and staff, and new initiatives to recruit and retain students of color. Washington State Rising is the first book to document 1960s Black student activism in the Pacific Northwest and includes extensive oral history interviews with former BSU members. Robinson uncovers new insights into Black politics, locating the Black Power Movement in Seattle, Washington, a city and state not typically associated with 1960s black protest. At once fascinating and revelatory, Washington State Rising provides historical insights for current and future social justice activism.

Black Passports
Black Passports

Author: Stephanie Y. Evans

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1438451547

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A resource guide that uses African American memoir to address a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. In this resource guide for fostering youth empowerment, Stephanie Y. Evans offers creative commentary on two hundred autobiographies that contain African American travel memoirs of places around the world. The narratives are by such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Angela Davis, Condoleezza Rice, and President Barack Obama, as well as by many lesser-known travelers. The book addresses a variety of issues related to mentoring and curriculum development. It serves as a tool for “literary mentoring,” where students of all ages can gain knowledge and wisdom from texts in the same way achieved by one-on-one mentoring, and it also provides ideas for incorporating these memoirs into lessons on history, geography, vocabulary, and writing. Focusing on four main mentoring themes—life, school, work, and cultural exchange—Evans encourages readers to comb the texts for models of how to manage attitudes, behaviors, and choices in order to be successful in transnational settings. “This book provides a new and refreshing way to think about Black youth and issues of empowerment. It will be a useful tool for teachers, parents, scholars, and community organizers, leaders, and activists.” — Valerie Grim, Indiana University Bloomington

The Forging of a Black Community
The Forging of a Black Community

Author: Quintard Taylor

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 0295750650

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Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

Seeking El Dorado
Seeking El Dorado

Author: Lawrence B. de Graaf

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 0295805315

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From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.