Life on the Color Line
Life on the Color Line

Author: Gregory Howard Williams

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1996-02-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1440673330

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“Heartbreaking and uplifting… a searing book about race and prejudice in America… brims with insights that only someone who has lived on both sides of the racial divide could gain.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “A triumph of storytelling as well as a triumph of spirit.”—Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here As a child in 1950s segregated Virginia, Gregory Howard Williams grew up believing he was white. But when the family business failed and his parents’ marriage fell apart, Williams discovered that his dark-skinned father, who had been passing as Italian-American, was half black. The family split up, and Greg, his younger brother, and their father moved to Muncie, Indiana, where the young boys learned the truth about their heritage. Overnight, Greg Williams became black. In this extraordinary and powerful memoir, Williams recounts his remarkable journey along the color line and illuminates the contrasts between the black and white worlds: one of privilege, opportunity and comfort, the other of deprivation, repression, and struggle. He tells of the hostility and prejudice he encountered all too often, from both blacks and whites, and the surprising moments of encouragement and acceptance he found from each. Life on the Color Line is a uniquely important book. It is a wonderfully inspiring testament of purpose, perseverance, and human triumph. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

The Color Line
The Color Line

Author: Igiaba Scego

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1635420873

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Inspired by true events, this gorgeous, haunting novel intertwines the lives of two Black female artists more than a century apart, both outsiders in Italy. It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn’t let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opportunity to study, travel, and follow her dreams, thanks to her indomitable spirit, but not without facing intolerance and violence. Now, in 1887, living in Rome as one of the city’s most established painters, she is ready to tell her fiancé about her difficult life, which began in a poor family forty years earlier. In 2019, an Italian art curator of Somali origin is desperately trying to bring to Europe her younger cousin, who is only sixteen and has already tried to reach Italy on a long, treacherous journey. While organizing an art exhibition that will combine the paintings of Lafanu Brown with the artworks of young migrants, the curator becomes more and more obsessed with the life and secrets of the nineteenth-century painter. Weaving together these two vibrant voices, Igiaba Scego has crafted a powerful exploration of what it means to be “other,” to be a woman, and particularly a Black woman, in a foreign country, yesterday and today.

The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America
The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America

Author: Reynolds Farley

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 1987-09-09

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 1610448332

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Is the United States a nation divided by the "color line," as W.E.B. Dubois declared? What is the impact of race on the lives of Americans today? In this powerful new assessment of the social reality of race, Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen compare demographic, social, and economic characteristics of blacks and whites to discover how and to what extent racial identity influences opportunities and outcomes in our society. They conclude that despite areas of considerable gain, black Americans continue to be substantially disadvantaged relative to whites. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series

North of the Color Line
North of the Color Line

Author: Sarah-Jane Mathieu

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-11-29

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0807899399

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North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.

Disabilities of the Color Line
Disabilities of the Color Line

Author: Dennis Tyler

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 147980584X

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"Rather than simply engaging in a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement are shunned alike, Disabilities of the Color Line argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability as a part of Black social life in varied and complex ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been and are made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and society. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of commonality and community that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability but also from a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order. Through the work of David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley, Disabilities of the Color Line examines how Black writer-activists have engaged in an aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that show how Black communities have rigorously acknowledged disability as a response to forms of racial injury and in the pursuit of racial and disability justice"--

Whispers on the Color Line
Whispers on the Color Line

Author: Gary Alan Fine

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-05-18

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0520228553

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"Fine and Turner present a wonderful exploration into what our seemingly mundane rumor-sharing means for race in our society. Filled with examples that we all can recognize, and superbly written and argued, Whispers on the Color Line will be a classic in the study of race and culture."—Mary Pattillo-McCoy, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class "Fine and Turner have written a disturbing, yet important book. Taking racially tinged (or drenched, as the case may be) rumors as an unobtrusive measure of the state of black-white relations in the U.S., the authors document the yawning social-cultural chasm in the nation. Contradicting the tepid national narrative that celebrates the "before" and "after" racial transformation achieved by the civil rights struggle, Whispers on the Color Line reminds us that the "peculiar dilemma" Gunnar Myrdal wrote about fifty-seven years ago is still very much with us. Until the "whispers" grow into a far more open and honest dialogue, nothing will change."—Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer "Whispers on the Color Line is a logical and necessary extension of the authors' earlier books (Fine's Manufacturing Tales and Turner's I Heard It Through the Grapevine), which work in tandem to explore racial issues through everyday narratives. The authors themselves represent an American cultural dialectic."—Janet Langlois, author of Belle Gunness, The Lady Bluebeard "Whispers on the Color Line is insightful and thought-provoking, powerfully underscoring the social significance of hearsay, rumors, and legends in everyday life. This rich and poignant narrative reveals and educates--an important contribution to social science understanding and to the ongoing discourse about race matters in this country."—Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City "This book speaks loudly to our most troubling contemporary problem: interactions among the "races" that are carried out in secret. The development of media such as the Internet (with its various aspects, from personal email to screeds sent out through listserves) has helped us recognize that rumors have gone public--and that we need to become involved in managing this process."—Roger Abrahams, author of Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South

Photography on the Color Line
Photography on the Color Line

Author: Shawn Michelle Smith

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2004-06-07

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780822333432

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DIVAn exploration of the visual meaning of the color line and racial politics through the analysis of archival photographs collected by W.E.B. Du Bois and exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1900./div

The Persistence of the Color Line
The Persistence of the Color Line

Author: Randall Kennedy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-08-16

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0307379809

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A “provocative and richly insightful new book” (The New York Times Book Review) that gives us a shrewd and penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency. Renowned for his insightful, common-sense critiques of racial politics, Randall Kennedy now tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama; whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans; the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites; the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society; the increasing irrelevance of a certain kind of racial politics and its consequences; the complex symbolism of Obama’s achievement and his own obfuscations and evasions regarding racial justice. Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers an incisive view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

Rethinking the Color Line
Rethinking the Color Line

Author: Charles Andrew Gallagher

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13:

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A collection for an undergraduate course, providing a theoretical framework and analytical tools and discussing the meaning of race and ethnicity as a social construction. The readings are designed to require students to negotiate between individual agency and the constraints of social structure, an