Diversity Fair- Join Wake Tech Libraries for our annual Diversity Fair! The Diversity Fair will take place on Wednesday, February 5 from 10 am -12 pm on the 1st floor of the Scott Northern Wake Campus Library. We look forward to seeing you there!
The North Carolina Museum of History and the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission invite you to join us virtually for the 21st annual African American Cultural Celebration on January 29, 2022, from 11:30 a.m.—5 p.m. for Black People, Green Planet: Environmental Justice.
The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.
The North Carolina Black Alliance addresses policy and economic issues to enhance black communities by developing and promoting systemic policy change as well as youth and leadership development.
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. KendiThe National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.
Call Number: E 185.61 .K358 2016
ISBN: 9781568584638
Publication Date: 2016-04-12
Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen SorinThe ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression. Enlivened by Sorin's personal history, Driving While Black opens an entirely new view onto the African American experience, and shows why travel was so central to the Civil Rights movement.
Call Number: E 185.61 .S667 2020
ISBN: 9781631495694
Publication Date: 2020-02-11
His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham; John Lewis (Afterword by)A timely and inspiring portrait of civil rights hero and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the quest for equal rights from the 1950s to the present--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present-from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofThe Soul of America NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST ANDCOSMOPOLITAN John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family's chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it-his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God-and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century." A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.
Call Number: E 840.8 .L43 M43 2020
ISBN: 9781984855022
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
Angel of Greenwood by Randi PinkA piercing, unforgettable love story set in Greenwood, Oklahoma, also known as the "Black Wall Street," and against the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Isaiah Wilson is, on the surface, a town troublemaker, but is hiding that he is an avid reader and secret poet, never leaving home without his journal. Angel Hill is a loner, mostly disregarded by her peers as a goody-goody. Her father is dying, and her family's financial situation is in turmoil. Though they've attended the same schools, Isaiah never noticed Angel as anything but a dorky, Bible toting church girl. Then their English teacher offers them a job on her mobile library, a three-wheel, two-seater bike. Angel can't turn down the money and Isaiah is soon eager to be in such close quarters with Angel every afternoon. But life changes on May 31, 1921 when a vicious white mob storms the Black community of Greenwood, leaving the town destroyed and thousands of residents displaced. Only then, Isaiah, Angel, and their peers realize who their real enemies are.
Call Number: PZ 7.1 .P565 An 2021
ISBN: 9781250768476
Publication Date: 2021-01-12
Soul City by Thomas HealyA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice 2021 Hooks National Book Award Winner The fascinating, forgotten story of the 1970s attempt to build a city dedicated to racial equality in the heart of "Klan Country" In 1969, with America's cities in turmoil and racial tensions high, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick announced an audacious plan: he would build a new city in rural North Carolina, open to all but intended primarily to benefit Black people. Named Soul City, the community secured funding from the Nixon administration, planning help from Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and endorsements from the New York Times and the Today show. Before long, the brand-new settlement - built on a former slave plantation - had roads, houses, a health care center, and an industrial plant. By the year 2000, projections said, Soul City would have fifty thousand residents. But the utopian vision was not to be. The race-baiting Jesse Helms, newly elected as senator from North Carolina, swore to stop government spending on the project. Meanwhile, the liberal Raleigh News & Observer mistakenly claimed fraud and corruption in the construction effort. Battered from the left and the right, Soul City was shut down after just a decade. Today, it is a ghost town - and its industrial plant, erected to promote Black economic freedom, has been converted into a prison. In a gripping, poignant narrative, acclaimed author Thomas Healy resurrects this forgotten saga of race, capitalism, and the struggle for equality. Was it an impossible dream from the beginning? Or a brilliant idea thwarted by prejudice and ignorance? And how might America be different today if Soul City had been allowed to succeed?
Call Number: F 264 .S685 H43 2021
ISBN: 9781627798624
Publication Date: 2021-02-02
Poemhood: Our Black Revival by Amber McBride; Erica Martin; Taylor Byas; L. L. C. Ashwin Writing (Photographer)Black experiences and traditions are complex, striking, and vast--they stretch longer than the Nile and are four times as deep--and carry more than just unimaginable pain--there is also joy. Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them.
ISBN: 9780063225282
Publication Date: 2024
HBCU Made by Ayesha RascoeIn this joyous essay collection edited by NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, celebrities and other alumni provide testimonials about their experience attending historically Black college universities-which shaped their lives and made them who they are today. With a diverse set of contributors, including Oprah Winfrey, Stacey Abrams, and Branford Marsalis, HBCU Made celebrates the experience of going to a historically Black college or university. In moving essays, a wide range of alums share their accounts of how they chose their HBCU, their first days on campus, the dynamic atmosphere, and how they were shaped by their rigorous training. A collection that brims with insight and school spirit, HBCU Made is a perfect gift for each generation of prospective students and graduates to come.
The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profound impact on U.S. society, but failed to break white supremacy. The symbol of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., soared so high that he tends to overwhelm anything associated with him. Yet the tradition that best describes him and other leaders of the civil rights movement has been strangely overlooked.
Junaluska is one of the oldest African American communities in western North Carolina and one of the few surviving today. After Emancipation, many former slaves in Watauga County became sharecroppers, were allowed to clear land and to keep a portion, or bought property outright, all in the segregated neighborhood on the hill overlooking the town of Boone, North Carolina. Land and home ownership have been crucial to the survival of this community, whose residents are closely interconnected as extended families and neighbors.
Even academically talented students face challenges in college. For high-achieving Black women, their racial, gender, and academic identities intensify those issues. Inside the classroom, they are spotlighted and feel forced to be representatives for their identity groups. In campus life, they are isolated and face microaggressions from peers.
Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.
A surprising and fascinating look at how Black culture has been leveraged by corporate America. Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater, and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors.
Articles of Interest
The Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent TimesA review of work on African Americans through archaeology takes place under diasporic studies and relies on literature that defines the North American black experience. The focus is on the establishment of freedom by the founding of maroon communities and independent settlements of free people, as well as on the use and interpretation of African diasporic history and theory, particularly by archaeologists using knowledge of the diaspora to effect modern political change.
Introduction Researching Nineteenth-Century African American HistoryJohn Mahé, the art curator of The Historic New Orleans Collection, contracted with a local conservator, Phyllis Hudson, to clean and repair the painting. For thirty years, the museum displayed the image without acknowledging the grievous damage, thereby reinforcing Hudsons error of historical interpretation.
Progress versus Social Justice:Memory at the National Museum of African American History and CultureFrom its inception, the National Mall has been a place of worship at the altar of a secular religion devoted to quasi-sacred national heroes and institutions.1 Sustained memory of slavery and its aftermath had to be repressed in the context of uncritical veneration of the Founding Fathers and dominant national ideologies around freedom, liberty, and progress toward a “more perfect Union.”
Soul Clap: Rhythm and Resilience in Afro-Carolina LandscapesOn an early winter Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina, a gathering was afoot. Stitched through the collected and collective souls was a shared, fierce, and tender passion for stewarding, writing about, archiving, talking about, crying about, dreaming about Black-ness.
North Carolina Black-ness--Afro-Carolina.
These teachers, filmmakers, curators, land conservationists, and poets were gathered to dream together, to call forth a new vision of how to best preserve the traditions of African Diaspora peoples, of and in this place.
One poet, visionary, and Afrofuturist among us, Darrell Stover, charged the air of the gathering with a selection from his self-published Somewhere Deep Down Within. The piece he chose was "Is the Beat for Max Roach."
Spatializing Race, Understanding History: A Professional Development Experience Centered on African American History and CultureU NITED STATES HISTORY classrooms have the potential to simultaneously foster an understanding of students’ cultures and experiences today in relation to the nation’s history and develop critical thinking and technology literacy. Yet classroom materials and instructors tend to avoid, ignore, or misrepresent controversial topics such as race and racism.1 Spatial technology information can offer an end to this dilemma by providing the opportunity
to overcome hesitations (both personal and pedagogical) of confronting race and racism in the classroom while honing students’ technology and critical thinking skills.
Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black InternationalismIn describing jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's music, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp stated, "If Trane had been a speaker, he might have spoken somewhat like Malcolm. If Malcolm had been a saxophone player, he might have played somewhat like Trane" (1).