{"text":"Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography is a 2014 memoir by former drug kingpin Rick Ross, co-authored by American crime writer Cathy Scott, about the rise and fall of Ross, in the 1980s and '90s, to his 2009 release from prison. The book was released by Freeway Studios in June 2014."}
{"text":"According to the publisher, the book embarks on the day-to-day dealings of a drug kingpin in the heart of the ghetto. It is also the story of a boy born into poverty in Texas who grew up in a single-parent household in the heart of South Central Los Angeles, next to the 110, thus the nickname \"Freeway,\" and was pushed through the school system, emerging illiterate. He saw his options as few and turned to drug dealing."}
{"text":"Authors Ross and Scott chronicle the times by highlighting the social climate that made crack cocaine so desirable. Ross points out that at the time the \"cops in the area didn't know what crack was; they didn't associate the small white rocks they saw on homies as illegal drugs.\" All Ross knew was people wanted it, so he sold it."}
{"text":"During his reign as the head of a nationwide drug enterprise, it is estimated that Ross profited nearly $300\u00a0million, selling nearly $3\u00a0million worth of drugs in one day. Ross' role in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair that took place during the Ronald Reagan administration was outlined in \"San Jose Mercury News\" reporter Gary Webb's original series of articles alleging that the CIA was complicit in smuggling drugs into the U.S., which effectively ignited the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s."}
{"text":"The autobiography includes the outcome of Ross' crack cocaine dealing, his conviction of conspiracy to illegally traffic cocaine, and the knowledge that the money Ross paid drug supplier Danilo Bland\u00f3n funded the Nicaraguan rebels in the Contra scandal, which Ross learned of while in prison when he was informed by \"San Jose Mercury-News\" reporter Webb. It also details Ross' successful appeal of his life sentence without the possibility of parole and his re-sentencing to 20 years. Ross was released from custody in September 2009."}
{"text":"In July 2014, Ross talked about what is included in the book, telling the NPR affiliate in Los Angeles that it took about five years of dealing before he saw the negative impact crack was having on his community, but customers asked for more. When he realized he did not want to see his brother or sister smoke crack cocaine, he decided to get out and start a legitimate business. \"This story,\" wrote \"Crimespree Magazine\"'s Marie Nicoll, \"will be retold and shared to American classrooms to children on what can happen when you go down the wrong path. His story shows the true meaning of having everything you could imagine, but at what price.\""}
{"text":"In the book's foreword, Los Angeles Bishop Noel Jones writes that \"this work portrays the heart of a man who is seeking the opportunity, in whatever form, to right the wrongs he has done to his community.\""}
{"text":"\"Freeway Rick Ross\" debuted at the Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles at a book launch on June 17, 2014 to a standing-room only crowd."}
{"text":"KCET TV wrote in its review, \"(The book) is fascinating for its unsentimental, inside look at his career on the streets of South Central, which started for Ross with car theft and quickly shifted to drugs and the big time.\""}
{"text":"The \"Los Angeles Sentinel\" wrote, \"While some have yet to move past the stigma of Ross' former image, it has worked to his advantage in dissuading students interested in following in his foot steps."}
{"text":"Upon its release, \"The Huffington Post UK\"'s Ruth Jacobs described the book as \"the eagerly awaited autobiography.\""}
{"text":"During a national book tour, Fox 59 in Indianapolis interviewed Ross about his autobiography in September 2014 for its morning show."}
{"text":"The book was named a finalist in \"ForeWord Reviews\"' Best Book of the Year 2014."}
{"text":"Leave the Light On is the second memoir written by Jennifer Storm. The book deals with Storm's recovery from drug and alcohol addiction and her experiences coming out of the closet. The book is the companion to \"\". It has been called \"fearlessly honest\" and \"courageous\" by \"We Magazine for Women\"."}
{"text":"Mr. Nice is the autobiography of former drug dealer Howard Marks. Published in 1996 it became an international bestseller due in large part to the humour and unabashed bravado the author uses to describe his life and the sheer scale of his drug deals involving, amongst others, the CIA, MI6, the IRA and the Mafia. The book received mostly positive reviews, though some critics were initially sceptical of some of the more outlandish details portrayed. It was adapted for film in 2010 as \"Mr. Nice\"."}
{"text":"Welsh born Marks began small scale dealing of hashish in the late 1960s whilst at Oxford University studying nuclear physics and, later, a postgraduate degree course in philosophy."}
{"text":"His activities rapidly expanded after a chance meeting with a Pakistani supplier made him realise how lucrative drug smuggling could be. After teaming up with Jim McCann, a senior member of the IRA, his business was soon bringing in huge amounts of cash and he began setting up various legitimate businesses as a front, to launder the proceeds of his hashish smuggling. At one time he claims to have had 25 such companies, 89 phone lines and 43 aliases, including the name used for the title of this book, Mr. Nice, an alias he adopted after buying a passport from a convicted murderer of that name."}
{"text":"Following his arrest in 1980 in a combined operation by British and Spanish police, Marks managed to avoid a lengthy sentence by claiming to be a spy for the British intelligence agency MI6. He was eventually caught again, this time by the American DEA, and sentenced to life in prison at Terre Haute federal penitentiary in Indiana. He was released after seven years and allowed to return to the UK."}
{"text":"The book was adapted into a film \"Mr. Nice\" in 2010, directed by Bernard Rose and starring Rhys Ifans and Chlo\u00eb Sevigny."}
{"text":"Growgirl is a 2012 book by former actor Heather Donahue about dropping out of Hollywood and moving to a semi-collective society in Nevada County, California's Sierra Mountains called \"Nuggettown\" to become first a \"pot wife\" then embrace the \"backbreaking, spirit-sucking work\" of a cannabis grower."}
{"text":"\"The Hollywood Reporter\" called the work \"always funny and surprisingly sweet\". \"Publishers Weekly\" said it was \"wry, with a nuanced distance from the events\". \"Kirkus Reviews\" called it \"at times funny, sensitive or filled with obscenities...an intimate look at a woman's yearlong search for her place in the world\"."}
{"text":"Prozac Nation is a memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel published in 1994. The book describes the author's experiences with atypical depression, her own character failings and how she managed to live through particularly difficult periods while completing college and working as a writer. Prozac is a trade name for the antidepressant fluoxetine. Wurtzel originally titled the book \"I Hate Myself and I Want To Die\" but her editor convinced her otherwise. It ultimately carried the subtitle \"Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir.\""}
{"text":"The book was adapted into a feature film, \"Prozac Nation\" (2001), starring Christina Ricci."}
{"text":"Writing in \"New York Magazine\", Walter Kirn found that although \"Prozac Nation\" had \"moments of shapely truth-telling,\" altogether it was \"almost unbearable\" and \"a work of singular self-absorption.\" Calling the book a \"tedious and poorly written story of Wurtzel's melodramatic life, warts and all (actually all warts),\" Erica L. Werner asked in \"The Harvard Crimson\", \"How did this chick get a book contract in the first place? Why was she allowed to write such crap?\" Werner also described \"Prozac Nation\" as \"obscenely exhibitionistic,\" with \"no purpose other than alternately to bore us and make us squirm.\" She said that the author \"comes off as an irritating, solipsistic brat.\""}
{"text":"\"It would be possible to have more sympathy for Ms. Wurtzel if she weren't so exasperatingly sympathetic to herself,\" wrote Ken Tucker in the \"New York Times Book Review\"."}
{"text":"He observed, \"The reader may well begin riffling the pages of the book in the vain hope that there will be a few complimentary Prozac capsules tucked inside for one's own relief.\" \"Kirkus Reviews\" thought the book to be filled with \"narcissistic pride\" and concluded, \"By alternately belittling and belaboring her depression, Wurtzel loses her credibility: Either she's a brat who won't shape up or she needs the drugs. Ultimately, you don't care which.\""}
{"text":"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life. The \"Confessions\" was \"the first major work De Quincey published and the one that won him fame almost overnight\"."}
{"text":"First published anonymously in September and October 1821 in the \"London Magazine\", the \"Confessions\" was released in book form in 1822, and again in 1856, in an edition revised by De Quincey."}
{"text":"As originally published, De Quincey's account was organised into two parts:"}
{"text":"Though De Quincey was later criticised for giving too much attention to the pleasure of opium and not enough to the harsh negatives of addiction, \"The Pains of Opium\" is in fact significantly longer than \"The Pleasures\". However, even when trying to convey darker truths, De Quincey's language can seem seduced by the compelling nature of the opium experience:"}
{"text":"From its first appearance, the literary style of the \"Confessions\" attracted attention and comment. De Quincey was well read in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and assimilated influences and models from Sir Thomas Browne and other writers. Arguably the most famous and often-quoted passage in the \"Confessions\" is the apostrophe to opium in the final paragraph of \"The Pleasures\":"}
{"text":"De Quincey modelled this passage on the apostrophe \"O eloquent, just and mightie Death!\" in Sir Walter Raleigh's \"History of the World\"."}
{"text":"Earlier in \"The Pleasures of Opium\" De Quincey describes the long walks he took through the London streets under the influence of the drug:"}
{"text":"The \"Confessions\" represents De Quincey's initial effort to write what he called \"impassioned prose\", an effort that he would later resume in \"Suspiria de Profundis\" (1845) and \"The English Mail-Coach\" (1849)."}
{"text":"In the early 1850s, De Quincey prepared the first collected edition of his works for publisher James Hogg. For that edition, he undertook a large-scale revision of the \"Confessions\", more than doubling the work's length. Most notably, he expanded the opening section on his personal background, until it consumed more than two-thirds of the whole. Yet he gave the book \"a much weaker beginning\" and detracted from the impact of the original with digressions and inconsistencies; \"the verdict of most critics is that the earlier version is artistically superior\"."}
{"text":"\"De Quincey undoubtedly spoiled his masterpiece by revising it... anyone who compares the two will prefer the unflagging vigour and tension of the original version to the tired prosiness of much of the revised one\"."}
{"text":"The \"Confessions\" maintained a place of primacy in De Quincey's literary output, and his literary reputation, from its first publication; \"it went through countless editions, with only occasional intervals of a few years, and was often translated. Since there was little systematic study of narcotics until long after his death, De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status and actually dominated the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations.\""}
{"text":"More generally, De Quincey's \"Confessions\" influenced psychology and abnormal psychology, and attitudes towards dreams and imaginative literature. Edgar Allan Poe praised \"Confessions\" for its \"glorious imagination\u2014deep philosophy\u2014acute speculation\"."}
{"text":"The play \"The Opium Eater\" by Andrew Dallmeyer was based on \"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater\", and has been published by Capercaillie Books. In 1962, Vincent Price starred in the full-length film \"Confessions of an Opium Eater\" which was a reimagining of De Quincey's \"Confessions\" by Hollywood producer Albert Zugsmith."}
{"text":"In the 1999 documentary \"Tripping\", recounting Ken Kesey's Further bus and its influence, Malcolm McLaren refers to De Quincey's book as the influence for the beatnik generation before Jack Kerouac's popular \"On the Road\" was written."}
{"text":"The Book of Drugs is a 2012 memoir by the musician and songwriter Mike Doughty. The book details Doughty's struggles with drug addiction, his musical career, both before and during his time with the band Soul Coughing and during his solo career."}
{"text":"The book was noted for its acerbic take on Doughty's Soul Coughing band mates, as well as its unflinching look at the damage caused by addiction."}
{"text":"The book covers Doughty's experiences growing up in a military family, his education, first experiences with drugs such as alcohol, his friendship with Jeff Buckley, and his antagonism with his (unnamed) fellow Soul Coughing band members. It also covers his experience with 12-step programs, his travels to Ethiopia and Cambodia, his experience with bipolar disorder, and his post-Soul Coughing solo career."}
{"text":"The book received a generally positive reception for its unflinching narrative and engaging writing. The \"Village Voice\" review called it a \"quickly paced, finely observed, and often mordantly funny read\"\u2014though some reviewers wondered, as Jay Trachtenberg of the \"Austin Chronicle\" did, why \"...if the atmosphere was so rancid, Doughty stuck around.\""}
{"text":"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a 1968 nonfiction book by Tom Wolfe. The book is a popular example of the New Journalism literary style. Wolfe presents a firsthand account of the experiences of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who traveled across the US in a colorfully painted school bus, the \"Furthur\", whose name was painted on the destination sign, indicating the general ethos of the Pranksters. Kesey and the Pranksters became famous for their use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD in order to achieve expansion of their consciousness. The book chronicles the Acid Tests (parties with LSD-laced Kool-Aid), encounters with notable figures of the time (Hells Angels, Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsberg) and describes Kesey's exile to Mexico and his arrests."}
{"text":"Tom Wolfe chronicles the adventures of Ken Kesey and his group of followers. Throughout the work, Kesey is portrayed as desiring the creation of a new religion. Kesey forms a group of followers based on the allure of transcendence achievable through drugs and his ability to preach and captivate listeners. The group was labelled as the \"Merry Pranksters\" and participated in a drug-fuelled lifestyle. The beginnings of Acid Tests started at Kesey's house in the woods of La Honda, California. The Acid Tests were carried out with lights and noise in order to enhance the psychedelic experience."}
{"text":"In an effort to broadcast their lifestyle, the Pranksters publicize their acid experiences and the term Acid Test comes to life. The Acid Tests are parties at which everyone takes LSD (which was often put into the Kool-Aid they served) and abandon the realities of the mundane world in search of a state of \"intersubjectivity.\" Just as the Acid Tests are catching on, Kesey is arrested for possession of marijuana. In an effort to avoid jail, he flees to Mexico and is joined by the Pranksters. The Pranksters struggle in Mexico and are unable to obtain the same results from their acid trips."}
{"text":"\"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test\" has been described as faithful and \"essential\" in depicting the roots and growth of the hippie movement."}
{"text":"The New Journalism literary style is seen to have elicited either fascination or incredulity by its audience. While The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was not the original standard for New Journalism, it is the most-often cited work of that genre. Wolfe's descriptions and accounts of the adventures of Kesey and his cohort were influencial and, particularly characteristic of New Journalism by inviting the reader to view the work as fiction rather than reportage."}
{"text":"The novel received modest literary acclaim, in particular for the clear narrative Wolfe maintained amidst the indulgent and often intoxicated milieu depicted. Despite Wolfe's immersion within Kesey's \"movement\" and advocacy of Kesey's and the Prankster's ideology, he renders sober portrayals of their experiences as being triggered by both paranoia and the acid trips which had become the group's cultural motif. Wolfe chronicles the Prankster's day-to-day lives and numerous psychedelic experiences, and his abstinence usefully differentiates his point of view. Wolfe endeavors to depict the Pranksters and Kesey within their environment, and as he believes they themselves wished to be seen."}
{"text":"While some saw New Journalism as the future of literature, the concept was not without criticism. There were many who challenged the believability of the style and there were many questions and criticisms about whether accounts were true. Wolfe however challenged such claims and notes that in books like \"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test\", he was nearly invisible throughout the narrative. He argues that he produced an uninhibited account of the events he witnessed. As proponents of fiction and orthodox nonfiction continued to question the validity of New Journalism, Wolfe stood by the growing discipline. Wolfe realized that this method of writing transformed the subjects of newspapers and articles into people with whom audiences could relate and sympathize."}
{"text":"Asked in 1989 by Terry Gross on \"Fresh Air\" what he thought of the book, Kesey replied, It's a good book. yeah, he\u2019s a\u2014Wolfe's a genius. He did a lot of that stuff, he was only around three weeks. He picked up that amount of dialogue and verisimilitude without tape recorder, without taking notes to any extent. He just watches very carefully and remembers. But, you know, he's got his own editorial filter there. And so what he's coming up with is part of me, but it's not all of me. . . .\""}
{"text":"Beautiful Things: A Memoir is a 2021 memoir by American lawyer Hunter Biden, who is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden. It was published on April 6, 2021 by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. In \"The New York Times\" reviewer Elisabeth Egan described the book as \"equal parts family saga, grief narrative and addict's howl\"."}
{"text":"In \"Beautiful Things\", Hunter Biden writes about his family and recounts his history of substance abuse and path to sobriety. He discusses the grief and trauma he experienced following the death of his brother Beau Biden and the 1972 car accident in which he was injured and that killed his mother, Neilia, and his sister, Naomi. He also defends his time on a Ukraine company board."}
{"text":"Hunter Biden told CBS that his cocaine addiction reached a zenith in 2015 after the death of his brother Beau.<ref>"}
{"text":"Then It Fell Apart is a 2019 memoir by American electronica musician Moby. Moby had previously written a memoir called \"\", published in 2016, which covered his life pre-fame. \"Then It Fell Apart\" covers the subsequent decade from 1999 to 2009 when Moby released the album \"Play\" to acclaim and success."}
{"text":"The memoir predominantly deals with Moby's life from 1999 to 2009 with some flashbacks to his early childhood. In particular, the memoir deals with his surprise at the accidental success of \"Play\", his descent into alcohol addiction, and his decision in 2007 to finally go to rehab in order to stay sober."}
{"text":"Moby also revealed that in 2001, he rubbed his flaccid penis on Donald Trump at a party after being dared to do so by his then-girlfriend. Details of this incident were later called into question by \"Vanity Fair\", who revealed that, based on Moby's own description of events, the incident most likely took place years later."}
{"text":"Kitty Empire writing for \"The Guardian\" called it \"funny and often harrowing\"."}
{"text":"The Hasheesh Eater (1857) is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract. In the United States, the book created popular interest in hashish, leading to hashish candy and private hashish clubs. The book was later popular in the counter-culture movement of the 1960s."}
{"text":"\"The Hasheesh Eater\" is often compared to \"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater\" (1821), Thomas De Quincey's account of his own addiction to laudanum (opium and alcohol)."}
{"text":"First published in 1857, \"The Hasheesh Eater\" went through four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, each put out by Harper & Brothers. In 1903, another publishing house put a reprint of the original edition \u2014 and the last complete edition until 1970. , two editions are in print, including an annotated version first published in 2003."}
{"text":"Ludlow said, \"The entire truth of Nature cannot be copied,\" so \"the artist must select between the major and minor facts of the outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the geometrician and destroy the effect.\" Many of his passages, which may have seemed like fantastic myth-making to his contemporaries, ring true today with more modern knowledge of the psychedelic state. Ludlow writes of one hallucination: \"And now, with time, space expanded also\u2026 The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.\""}
{"text":"Ludlow describes the marijuana user as one who is reaching for \"the soul\u2019s capacity for a broader being, deeper insight, grander views of Beauty, Truth and Good than she now gains through the chinks of her cell.\" Conversely, he says of hashish users: \"Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses.\""}
{"text":"The popularity of \"The Hasheesh Eater\" led to interest in the drug it described. Not long after its publication, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising \"Hasheesh Candy\":"}
{"text":"The Arabian \"Gunjh\" of Enchantment confectionized. \u2014 A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant. \u2014 Cures Nervousness, Weakness, Melancholy, &c. Inspires all classes with new life and energy. A complete mental and physical invigorator."}
{"text":"John Hay, who would become a close confidant of President Lincoln and later U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University as the place \u201cwhere I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.\u201d And a classmate recalls that after reading Ludlow\u2019s book, Hay \u201cmust needs experiment with hasheesh a little, and see if it was such a marvelous stimulant to the imagination as Fitzhugh Ludlow affirmed. \u2018The night when Johnny Hay took hasheesh\u2019 marked an epoch for the dwellers in Hope College.\u201d"}
{"text":"Within twenty-five years of the publication of \"The Hasheesh Eater\", many cities in the United States had private hashish parlors. And there was already controversy about the legality and morality of cannabis intoxication. In 1876, when tourists could buy hashish at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the \"Illustrated Police News\" would write about \u201cThe Secret Dissipation of New York Belles\u2026 a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.\u201d"}
{"text":"Ludlow\u2019s writings crop up in a couple of places in pre-marijuana-prohibition 20th century America. The occultist Aleister Crowley found \"The Hasheesh Eater\" to be \u201ctainted by admiration of de Quincey and the sentimentalists\u201d but admired Ludlow\u2019s \u201cwonderful introspection\u201d and printed significant excerpts from the book in his journal \"The Equinox\". Using the pseudonym Oliver Haddo, Crowley also wrote at length about his own cannabis experiences, comparing and contrasting them to those of Ludlow. He \u201cwas struck by the circumstance that [Ludlow], obviously ignorant of Vedantist and Yogic doctrines, yet approximately expressed them, though in a degraded and distorted form.\u201d"}
{"text":"After the prohibition of marijuana, the writings of Ludlow were interpreted by two camps. On the one hand, there were the prohibitionists, who pointed out Ludlow\u2019s addiction to \u201chasheesh\u201d and his horrifying hallucinations; on the other, those who believed that cannabis deserved a second chance and saw Ludlow as a literate chronicler of the mystical heights that could be reached using the drug."}
{"text":"In 1938, shortly after the federal government cracked down on marijuana, the prohibitionist warning was carried in the book \"Marihuana: America\u2019s New Drug Problem\". The book included several pages of excerpts from \"The Hasheesh Eater\" and noted that"}
{"text":"It was Ludlow\u2026 who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects. He not only described the acute hashish episode with great intensity and fidelity but recorded the development of an addiction and the subsequent struggle which resulted in his breaking the habit. As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to De Quincey's \u201cConfessions\u201d"}
{"text":"In 1953, Union College selected the alumnus Fitz Hugh Ludlow as a \u201cUnion Worthy\u201d and invited three academics to compose speeches for the occasion. Morris Bishop (who would later include his impressions in his book \"Eccentrics\"), criticized Ludlow\u2019s later attempts at fiction, writing that his short stories \u201care today stale and meaningless\u2026 echoes of all the other magazine stories of his time, originating in literature, not in life, and conducted with no regard for truth and with little for verisimilitude.\u201d In \"The Hasheesh Eater\" on the other hand:"}
{"text":"is a sincerity, a reality, which he could not recapture when he tried to construct stories solely from his imagination\u2026 He finds lyric phrasing to convey the unearthly beauty of his visions, and the unearthly horror of the evil fantasia which succeeded his bliss. He is a drugged Dante in reverse, descending from the Paradiso to the Inferno. His descriptions, drawing from his subconscious a strange mingling of the sublime and the grotesque, often suggest the work of Dali and other surrealists. The writer\u2019s passion gives his work an intensity which the reader recognizes and sympathetically feels. This is a very considerable literary achievement."}
{"text":"Robert DeRopp, in the 1957 book \"Drugs and the Mind\", was perhaps the first to express skepticism at Ludlow\u2019s \u201caddiction\u201d story, noting that \u201c[n]o one seriously interested in the effects of drugs on the mind should fail to read Ludlow\u2019s book,\u201d but accusing Ludlow of a \u201chypertrophy of the imagination and an excessive dependence on the works of De Quincey\u201d (although he also found \"The Hasheesh Eater\" to be \u201cmore lively and more colorful reading than\u2026 the grossly overrated confessions of that \u2018English opium-eater.\u2019\u201d). DeRopp suspected that \u201cin many places scientific impartiality has been sacrificed in the interests of literary effect.\u201d"}
{"text":"At this point we are at the dawn of the resurgence of marijuana in the United States and the emergence of psychedelics in the English-speaking world. Researchers, like pioneering mescaline researcher Heinrich Kl\u00fcver, looked to Ludlow\u2019s seminal writings on the psychedelic experience for insight on the new drugs that were being discovered and synthesized."}
{"text":"In 1960, \"The Hasty Papers: A One-Shot Review\", a beat literature journal, devoted most of its pages to reprinting the first edition of \"The Hasheesh Eater\" in its entirety, and David Ebin\u2019s book \"The Drug Experience\" included three chapters from \"The Hasheesh Eater\". In 1966, excerpts were published in \"The Marijuana Papers\" edited by David Solomon. In 1970, a reprint of the 1857 edition was put out by Gregg Press, and the \"Berkeley Barb\" reprinted several chapters."}
{"text":"By this time Ludlow had been rediscovered, both by mainstream researchers into drugs and addiction, and by the growing drug-savvy counterculture. Oriana J. Kalant, in 1971 in \"The International Journal of the Addictions\" found \"The Hasheesh Eater\" to be a remarkable description of the effects of cannabis:"}
{"text":"With the benefit of hindsight, we can also identify in Ludlow\u2019s account a number of other features consistent with present knowledge, but which even scientists of his day could not possibly have known. For example, the initial change in tolerance, the continuum between euphoria and hallucinations, the differentiation between the hallucinatory process and the affective reactions to it, the relation between spontaneous and drug-induced perceptual changes, the similarity between the effects of cannabis and those of other hallucinogens, the attempts at drug substitution therapy (opium, tobacco), and the role of psychotherapy and abreactive writing, are all in keeping with contemporary thought. These points permit the modern reader to feel even greater confidence in the extraordinary accuracy and perceptiveness of Ludlow\u2019s record."}
{"text":"The mid 1970s saw two new editions of \"The Hasheesh Eater\" in print, one by San Francisco\u2019s City Lights Books, and a well-annotated and illustrated version edited by Michael Horowitz and released by Level Press. By the late 1970s, you could even find the face of Fitz Hugh Ludlow on a T-shirt, thanks to his alma mater Union College, which had thrown a \u201cFitzhugh Ludlow Day\u201d celebration in 1979."}
{"text":"In the 2000s, Ludlow has been introduced to a new generation of psychedelics users through Terence McKenna, who read chapters from \"The Hasheesh Eater\" for a set of tapes (\u201cVictorian Tales of Cannabis\u201d) put out by Sound Photosynthesis, and who regularly praised Ludlow in his books, saying Ludlow \u201cbegan a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.\u2026 Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.\u201d"}
{"text":"\"The Hasheesh Eater\" remains Ludlow's most remembered work. Only one other of his books, \"The Heart of the Continent\", has seen a new edition since the 19th Century."}
{"text":"How to Murder Your Life is a memoir by fashion and beauty journalist Cat Marnell. Marnell sold the book in 2013 for an undisclosed sum. The memoir was finally released in 2017 by Simon & Schuster and became a bestseller."}
{"text":"The memoir deals with Marnell's childhood in a wealthy D.C. suburb, her introduction to drugs, her entry into the world of fashion journalism, and her continued struggles with addiction, which constantly threatened to torpedo her career."}
{"text":"She gets into an acting class in New York City, but finds the workshops boring and is unable to make friends. Alone and isolated, she develops bulimia. While attending a show at the Comedy Cellar, she is picked up by Ardie Fuqua, who helps to introduce her to NYC nightlife. Marnell spends the next few years developing a drug habit, dropping in and out of colleges, and building contacts in the entertainment and fashion worlds."}
{"text":"During her unemployment, Marnell attempts suicide. After being cut off from the rest of her family, she turns to her wealthy grandmother, Mimi, who pays off her debts and allows her to stay with her in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marnell eventually returns to New York and splits her time between that city and Charlottesville. When Jane Pratt launches the online magazine \"xoJane\" in 2011, Marnell's friend Lesley Arfin encourages her to apply. Marnell is hired and while there, works on health, beauty, and drugs, finally able to write openly about her experiences as an addict."}
{"text":"While she disdains the online publication, her columns are nevertheless successful. After Whitney Houston dies in early 2012, Marnell writes about life as a woman who is a drug addict and the piece goes viral, leading her to negotiate a raise with \"xoJane\". Shortly after, Marnell leaves the publication, in part due to her continued drug use. Nevertheless, in a series of interviews she gives about being a drug addict, her popularity rises. She is able to negotiate a well-paying job at \"Vice\" and obtain a literary agent, though it takes her until 2013 to piece together a coherent book proposal."}
{"text":"In an afterword, Marnell claims to be doing much better, saying she is much closer with her family, but also admits to still abusing drugs."}
{"text":"Marnell's memoir was warmly received. \"The Globe and Mail\" praised her \"chic-macabre sense of humour\". Anne Helen Petersen, writing for \"The New York Times\", praised her for keeping a balance \"between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.\""}
{"text":"\"The Irish Times\", however, criticized the memoir, saying that Marnell was always playing the persona of Cat Marnell, and suggested \"she can do much better\"."}
{"text":"Hole in My Life is an American autobiography of Jack Gantos and was published by Macmillan Publishers in 2002. In 2003 the book was honored with the Michael L. Printz Award and the same year became a winner of the Robert F. Sibert Medal."}
{"text":"The book received positive reviews from \"Kirkus Reviews\" and \"Publishers Weekly\"."}
{"text":"Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey Through Afghanistan is a 2011 book by Fariba Nawa. The author travels throughout Afghanistan to talk with individuals part of the opium production in Afghanistan, centering on women's role in it. Generally, reviewers felt that the book succeeded in its portrayal of Afghan culture and the impact of the opium trade on Afghans."}
{"text":"Nawa discusses opium trafficking in Afghanistan, a trade she said is valued at $4 billion in the country and $65 billion outside it. 60% of Afghanistan's GDP comes from opium, of which two-thirds is distilled into heroin, a more potent drug. Because the distillation requires cooking, the traffickers allow women to take part in it. A large number of women and their families are beholden to opium. About 10\u201325% of women and children are speculated to be addicted to the drug. Many families serve in the opium enterprise as \"opium farmers, refiners, or smugglers\"."}
{"text":"Nawa reveals the story of an uncle who kidnaps a six-year-old boy and his friend in Takhar Province, an attempt to coerce the boy's father to settle an opium debt. When the debt is not settled, the boy disappears and his friend's body is found after several days in a river."}
{"text":"She discusses the positive economic impact the opium industry has had on some families. For one woman, poppy cultivation allowed her to buy a taxi for her son and a carpet frame for her daughter. Some newly affluent farmers use some of the wealth to improve the infrastructure of their neighborhoods."}
{"text":"At the book's end, she reveals that she has married Naeem Mazizian, whom she had met at the Herat chapter of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2005, he moves to Kabul. Following four years of companionship, they marry and have a daughter, Bonoo Zahra. Nawa dedicated the book to her daughter and her parents, Sayed Begum and Fazul Haq."}
{"text":"\"Part personal memoir and part history\", the book delves into the elements of Afghanistan society seldom seen or comprehended by outsiders. \"The Canberra Times\" reviewer Bron Sibree called the book a \"unique, finely distilled, intense perspective\" that was \"surprisingly frank and intimate\" because women confide in her beliefs they do not tell other people. The book is packed with numerous facts and numbers pertaining to the swell in the drug business. Sibree noted that the narrative is filled with accounts of Afghan history, particularly its traditions and its elegant, multifarious landscapes. Sibree opined that Nawa's intense depiction of the Afghanis, notably the women who are unflappable notwithstanding their adversity, are etched into the mind even after an extended period of time."}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" praised Nawa for deftly depicting the \"tragic complexity of Afghan society and the sheer difficulty of life there\". The reviewer found parts of the book's dialogue to be contrived but noted that Nawa's convincing narrative \"clearly stems from in-depth reporting in a risk-laden environment\". Novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of \"The Kite Runner\" and \"A Thousand Splendid Suns\" praised the book for having a \"very engaging narrative\" and being \"[a]n insightful and informative look at the global challenge of Afghan drug trade\". Writing for \"The Sun-Herald\", author Lucy Sussex called the book \"strong, informative reading\"."}
{"text":"In February 2012, \"Opium Nation\" ranked seventh in the \"independent\" section of \"The Newcastle Herald\"s bestseller list."}
{"text":"Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs is a book by Johann Hari examining the history and impact of drug criminalisation, collectively known as \"the War on Drugs\". The book was published simultaneously in the United Kingdom and United States in January 2015. It inspired the 2021 biographical film \"The United States vs. Billie Holiday\"."}
{"text":"In January 2012, Hari announced on his website that he was writing his first book, a study of the \"war on drugs\"."}
{"text":"The release of the book coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in the United States, which was the world's first drug control legislation when it passed in December 1914. In \"Chasing the Scream\", Hari writes that two global wars began in 1914: World War I, which lasted four years, and the war on drugs, which is ongoing."}
{"text":"In the introduction to the book, Hari writes that one of his first memories was of trying and failing to wake up a relative from a \"drugged slump\", and that he has always felt \"oddly drawn to addicts and recovering addicts\u2014they feel like my tribe, my group, my people\". He also discusses his history of abusing anti-narcolepsy medication, a class of prescription drugs sometimes taken by people without the disease in order to stay alert."}
{"text":"Hari questions whether or not he is an addict and decides to go searching for answers to questions he has. \"Why did the drug war start, and why does it continue? Why can some people use drugs without any problems, while others can't? What really causes addiction? What happens if you choose a radically different policy?\""}
{"text":"Hari writes that he spent the next three years in search of answers, traveling across nine countries (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Uruguay and Vietnam)."}
{"text":"He profiles early figures in the drug war like jazz musician Billie Holiday, a long-time heroin addict; racketeer Arnold Rothstein, an early drug trafficker; and Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (who had a daily morphine habit)."}
{"text":"He also interviews drug addicts, dealers, police and lawmakers today, as well as scientists, drug addiction specialists and drug reform advocates like Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles, as well as Jo\u00e3o Goul\u00e3o, a doctor who has helped steer Portugal's drug policy."}
{"text":"One of his interviewees is Bruce K. Alexander, the researcher behind the \"Rat Park\" drug addiction experiments done in the 1970s. Alexander's hypothesis is that drugs themselves do not cause addiction, which is largely in contrast to current popular beliefs about drugs and drug addiction."}
{"text":"Hari writes, \"Many of our most basic assumptions about this subject are wrong. Drugs are not what we think they are. Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is. The drug war is not what our politicians have sold it as for one hundred years and counting.\""}
{"text":"An introductory page of \"Chasing the Scream\" states that audio files of all quotes in the book from Hari's interviews are available online at the book's official website. On the site, it states that there are more than 400 quotes spoken to Hari appearing in the book: \"To be as transparent as possible, they are posted on this website \u2013 so as you read the book, you can listen the voices of the people in it, as they tell their stories for themselves.\" The book also includes 60 pages of explanatory notes on sources and interviews."}
{"text":"The website includes a section for questions and corrections, with a note from Hari asking readers to submit any factual errors in the book to be corrected \"for future editions and for the record\". This section includes a few transcription errors from recorded interviews that were not noticed until after publication; for example, a quote from Bruce K. Alexander saying \"learning to deal with the modern age\u201d was incorrectly transcribed and printed in the book as \"learning to live with the modern age\". Author and anti-plagiarism campaigner Jeremy Duns accused Hari of inaccuracy in some of his quotations, claiming that Hari had \"twisted the truth here because it made his narrative cleaner\"."}
{"text":"\"Chasing the Scream\" has received mostly positive reviews from critics and journalists."}
{"text":"Kate Tuttle of the \"Boston Globe\" called it a \"passionate, timely book\" and that through reading the stories of Hari's interview subjects, including drug addicts, drug dealers, scientists and politicians, \"their combined testimony forms a convincing brief that drug prohibition may have spawned as much crime, violence, and heartache as drug use ever did\"."}
{"text":"Reviewer Nick Romeo of \"The Christian Science Monitor\" wrote a lengthy synopsis on \"Chasing the Scream\", analysing the book's presentation of the history of drug criminalisation, its racial aspects, and scientific data concerning addiction. Romeo wrote of Hari, \"His reporting is balanced and comprehensive; he interviews police and prisoners, addicts and dealers, politicians and activists. He also delves into different historical periods as case studies on the costs and benefits of the drug war. His book should be required reading for anyone involved in the drug war, and a glance at the national budget shows that anyone who pays taxes is involved in the drug war.\""}
{"text":"Hugo Rifkind wrote in his review for \"The Times\" that it is \"tempting, albeit petty, to read \"Chasing the Scream\" less as a book and more as an act of rehabilitation\". Rifkind ultimately called it \"thoughtful, thorough and questing, and full of fresh and genuine reportage about aspects of the drug economy\"."}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" praised the book, calling Hari \"a sharp judge of character\" and that the book is \"a compassionate and humane argument to overturn draconian drug policies\"."}
{"text":"David Nutt, an English psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in drug research, wrote a positive review of \"Chasing the Scream\" for \"The Evening Standard\". He praised Hari's research into the early events of anti-drug laws, some of which, Nutt noted, he himself had forgotten ever occurred. He called the personal stories of those affected the most \"horrific\", writing \"The lack of evidence of the war having worked, alongside massive evidence of failure, are detailed with a frightening clarity\". Nutt, the former chief scientific advisor on drugs to the British government, concluded, \"Read it and demand our politicians take note!\""}
{"text":"Seth Mnookin, professor of science writing at MIT, wrote in his \"New York Times\" review that Hari is \"in over his head\" when writing about the current science of addiction: \"[H]is misunderstanding of some of the basic principles of scientific research \u2014 that anecdotes are not data; that a conclusion is not a fact \u2014 transforms what had been an affecting jeremiad into a partisan polemic\". Mnookin also characterises Hari's historical account of the early prohibition of drugs as \"forced\". In contrast, Mnookin's assessment of Hari's discussions of current events is generally quite positive."}
{"text":"Elite da Tropa is a Brazilian book written by the ex-police officers Andr\u00e9 Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel together with Luiz Eduardo Soares. It was first published in 2006. The book originated the film \"Elite Squad\"."}
{"text":"Based on real facts, this book recounts stories about the Batalh\u00e3o de Opera\u00e7\u00f5es Policiais Especiais (BOPE), considered an elite squad in Rio de Janeiro's Military Police. The book depicts the officers from BOPE as an incorruptible and extremely violent troop."}
{"text":"This book also describes the plan to assassinate Leonel Brizola, the then governor of Rio de Janeiro."}
{"text":"Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion is a 1998 book by journalist Gary Webb. The book is based on \"Dark Alliance\", Webb's three-part investigative series published in the \"San Jose Mercury News\" in August 1996. The original series claimed that, in order to help raise funds for efforts against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, the CIA supported cocaine trafficking into the US by top members of Nicaraguan Contra Rebel organizations and allowed the subsequent crack epidemic to spread in Los Angeles. The book expands on the series and recounts media reaction to Webb's original newspaper expos\u00e9."}
{"text":"\"Dark Alliance\" was published in 1998 by Seven Stories Press, with an introduction by U.S. Representative Maxine Waters. A revised edition was published in 1999. The same year the book won a Pen Oakland Censorship Award and a Firecracker Alternative Book Award. It served as part of the basis for \"Kill the Messenger\", a 2014 film based on Webb's life."}
{"text":"According to Webb, in the 1980s when the CIA exerted a certain amount of control over Contra groups such as the FDN, the agency as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) granted amnesty to and put on the agency\u2019s bankroll important Contra supporters and fundraisers who were known to the US Government to be cocaine smugglers. Later, at the behest of Oliver North, the Reagan Administration began to use Contra drug money to support the anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels' efforts against the Sandinista government. The Sandinistas were hated by successive Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations for the 1978-79 Sandinista Revolution (the overthrowing of the U.S.-sponsored brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) and for their support of worker and peasant revolutions developing throughout Central and South America."}
{"text":"Blandon, a cocaine smuggler who founded an FDN chapter in Los Angeles, was a major supplier for Freeway Ricky Ross. With access to cheap, pure cocaine and the idea to cook the cocaine into crack, Ross established a major drug network and fueled the popularity of crack. By 1983, Ross was purchasing 10 to 15 kilos of cocaine a week from CIA-backed Contra supporter Blandon - according to Blandon. All the while, Webb alleges, the CIA was supporting the Contras supplying him with the cocaine. Meanwhile, the US Justice Department and its agencies - who were aware of the Contra-linked drug trafficking operations of the FDN supporters - derailed local police investigations and blocked the prosecution of the Contra-linked cocaine traffickers."}
{"text":"Reviewers' opinions of the book were mixed. David Corn, Washington editor for \"The Nation\" magazine, reviewed the book in \"The Washington Post\". Corn had previously been critical of aspects of the \"Dark Alliance\" newspaper series, and he found that the book \"reflects the positives and negatives of the original series.\" He noted that Webb \"deserves credit for pursuing an important piece of recent history and forcing the CIA and the Justice Department to investigate the contra-drug connection\", but remained critical of several aspects of the book, observing that Webb's \"threshold of proof is on the low side\"."}
{"text":"James Adams, Washington correspondent for the \"Sunday Times\", wrote a largely negative review for \"The New York Times\". Adams was critical of Webb's \"failure\" to contact the CIA to \"cross-check sources and allegations,\" and concluded that \"For investigative reporters determined to uncover the truth, procedures like these are unacceptable. Neither the editors of the \"San Jose Mercury News\" nor the publishers of these books should have allowed their writers to take such relaxed approaches to a serious subject.\""}
{"text":"Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (New York: Nation Books, 2006) is a biography of investigative journalist Gary Webb, focusing on his 1996 \"Dark Alliance\" investigative series in the \"San Jose Mercury News\". The series linked the 1980s' crack cocaine trade in the United States and the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras."}
{"text":"\"Kill the Messenger\" was adapted into a 2014 film by the same name."}
{"text":"E for Ecstasy is a book written by Nicholas Saunders and published in May 1993. The book describes in detail the psychoactive substance MDMA (ecstasy), the people that use it and the law concerning it, all enhanced through the backdrop of the author's personal experience."}
{"text":"Subsequent revised versions were renamed \"Ecstasy and the Dance Culture\" (1995) and \"Ecstasy Reconsidered\" (1997). The book is available freely online."}
{"text":"The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs is the sixth book by the British author and \"Mail on Sunday\" columnist Peter Hitchens, first published in 2012."}
{"text":"The book is intended as a rebuttal of what Hitchens sees as the widespread acceptance of drug use and the weakening of drug prohibition in Britain since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, when a Conservative government adopted a Labour Party policy to implement the Wootton Report. Hitchens believes that there is \"de facto\" decriminalisation of drugs in the UK, especially of cannabis, contrary to claims of drug \"prohibition\" from \"Big Dope\" (name he gives to the cannabis legalisation lobby). Hitchens contends that it is only through much harsher and more stringent punishment \u2013 for both consumers and dealers of drugs \u2013 that any war on drugs can be successful."}
{"text":"Before the book's publication, Hitchens had often advocated in his writing a society governed by conscience and the rule of law, which he sees as the best guarantee of liberty, and he had also frequently and at length voiced opposition to the decriminalisation of recreational drugs (arguing that the legal prohibition of drug use is an essential counterweight to \"pro-drug propaganda\") and had debated a number of figures who are for such decriminalisation, including Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and Howard Marks. He has also debated the topic of drugs with the comedian Russell Brand."}
{"text":"In April 2012, Hitchens had given evidence to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee as part of its inquiry into drugs policy and called for the British government to introduce a more hardline policy on drugs."}
{"text":"The cover image is an obvious take on the album cover for \"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band\"."}
{"text":"A month before \"The War We Never Fought\"'s publication, Ed West in \"The Daily Telegraph\" said that the book had provoked criticism not only from the Left, but also from the free-market libertarian Right."}
{"text":"In \"Prospect\" magazine, Peter Lilley wrote that Hitchens \"realises there are only two logically coherent policies: prohibition and legalisation. Decriminalisation, the fashionable option of the intelligentsia, makes no sense, though it is the destination which policy in this country has moved towards for several decades\" and \"the most refreshing aspect of this book is its recognition that drug taking is fundamentally a moral issue\". A largely positive review by William Dove in the \"International Business Times\" stated that, \"Hitchens makes a convincing case that the anti-drug laws are not unenforceable as legalisers might claim, but unenforced\"."}
{"text":"In a very critical review in \"The Observer\", Nicholas Lezard stated that the book \"should never have been published\","}
{"text":"while Jonathan R\u00e9e in \"The Guardian\" dismissed the book as \"hysterical\" and accused its author of \"moral racism\"."}
{"text":"The Basketball Diaries is a 1978 memoir written by author and musician Jim Carroll. It is an edited collection of the diaries he kept between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Set in New York City, they detail his daily life, sexual experiences, high school basketball career, poetry compositions, the counterculture movement, and especially his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13."}
{"text":"The book was made into a film of the same name in 1995 starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jim Carroll and Mark Wahlberg as Mickey."}
{"text":"Carroll followed up this memoir with a sequel of sorts called \"The Downtown Diaries\" which follows his relocation to California and his efforts to end his heroin addiction."}
{"text":"How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is a 2018 book by Michael Pollan. It became a No. 1 \"New York Times\" best-seller."}
{"text":"\"How to Change Your Mind\" chronicles the long and storied history of psychedelic drugs, from their turbulent 1960s heyday to the resulting countermovement and backlash. Through his coverage of the recent resurgence in this field of research, as well as his own personal use of psychedelics via a \"mental travelogue\", Pollan seeks to illuminate not only the mechanics of the drugs themselves, but also the inner workings of the human mind and consciousness."}
{"text":"The book is organized into six chapters with an epilogue:"}
{"text":"Pollan has been interviewed concerning the book on popular podcasts such as The Tim Ferriss Show, The Kevin Rose Show and \"The Joe Rogan Experience\"."}
{"text":"\"How to Change Your Mind\" received many positive reviews."}
{"text":"\"The New York Times Book Review\" named \"How to Change Your Mind\" one of the best books of 2018."}
{"text":"Kevin Canfield of the \"San Francisco Chronicle\" wrote: \"In 'How to Change Your Mind', Pollan explores the circuitous history of these often-misunderstood substances, and reports on the clinical trials that suggest psychedelics can help with depression, addiction and the angst that accompanies terminal illnesses. He does so in the breezy prose that has turned his previous booksthese include \"The Omnivore's Dilemma\" and \"\", the inspiration for his winning Netflix documentaries of the same nameinto bestsellers.\""}
{"text":"Jacob Sullum of the libertarian magazine \"Reason\" gave the book a generally positive review, but faulted Pollan for criticizing Timothy Leary's self-promotion without allocating blame to the politicians and journalists who shut down the promising scientific study of psychedelics."}
{"text":"Writing in \"New York\" magazine, conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan praised \"How to Change Your Mind\" as \"astounding.\""}
{"text":"\"How to Change Your Mind\" received two positive reviews from \"Vox\". Ezra Klein described it as \"one of the most mind-expanding books I have read this year.\" Sean Illing said that Pollan \"describe[s] what it's like to take psychedelics. But beyond that, he also walks the reader through the history of these drugs and surveys the latest research into their therapeutic potential. It's a sprawling book that is likely to change how you think not just about psychedelic drugs but also about the human mind.\""}
{"text":"Mark Rozzo reviewed \"How to Change Your Mind\" in \"Columbia\" magazine. He writes that the book \"offers a convincingly grown-up case for the potential of drugs that, having survived decades of vilification, now seem poised to revolutionize several fields, from mental health to neuroscience.\""}
{"text":"Oliver Burkeman wrote of the book in \"The Guardian\": \"\"How to Change Your Mind\" is Pollan\u2019s sweeping and often thrilling chronicle of the history of psychedelics, their brief modern ascendancy and suppression, their renaissance and possible future, all interwoven with a self-deprecating travelogue of his own cautious but ultimately transformative adventures as a middle-aged psychedelic novice.\""}
{"text":"Drew Gwilliams wrote a review of the book for the scientific journal \"Chemistry World\". He called it \"a fascinating history of psychedelic drugs\" and said \"Pollan approaches the topic with a combination of intelligent curiosity and skepticism, deftly avoiding controversial debates while seeking clarity and comprehension.\""}
{"text":"Licit and Illicit Drugs is a 1972 book on recreational drug use by medical writer Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports."}
{"text":"The book describes the effects and risks of psychoactive drugs which were common in contemporary use for recreational and nonmedical purposes. \"The New York Times\" paraphrased some major arguments from the book, saying \"'Drug-free' treatment of heroin addiction almost never works\", \"Nicotine can be as tough to beat as heroin\", and \"Good or bad, marijuana is here to stay. The billions spent to fight it are wasted dollars.\" The book identifies marijuana as the most popular drug after tobacco, alcohol, and nicotine. A reviewer for the \"Journal of the American Medical Association\" summarized it by saying that \"Brecher holds that the division of drugs into licit and illicit categories is medically irrational and rooted mainly in historical and sociological factors.\""}
{"text":"The book's 10 main sections are titled as follows:"}
{"text":"In the \"Annals of Internal Medicine\" a reviewer said that the book should be read by every physician who cares for adolescents. In another journal a reviewer described the book as an \"important work (which) stresses the historical and social perspectives on the drugs of abuse as well as the current laws, attitudes, and policies concerning all commonly used and abused drugs\" and that he was \"impressed with the conclusions concerning the failure of the judicial and penal systems\" and \"that both sides of many controversial issues are presented.\" \"Kirkus Reviews\" described the book as, \"Liberal in the best sense, rigorously researched, and free from cant, the Consumer Union Report should become a standard referral.\""}
{"text":"The Rhetoric of Drugs () in the original French title, is a 1990 work by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida, interviewed, discusses the concept of \"drug\", and says that \"Already one must conclude that the concept of drug is a non-scientific concept, that it is instituted on the basis of moral or political evaluations.\" In his philosophical-linguistic analysis, Derrida unmasks the socio-cultural mystifications made on the discourses on drugs."}
{"text":"Derrida also discusses drugs use by athletes. Exploring its confines, he says: \"and what about women athletes who get pregnant for the stimulating, hormonal effects and then have an abortion after their event?\""}
{"text":"Derrida discusses how the link between the rhetoric of drugs and the Western ideology. He also says that \"Adorno and Horkheimer correctly point out that drug culture has always been associated with the West's other, with Oriental ethics and religion\", and adds: \"The Enlightenment [...] is in itself a declaration of war on drugs.\""}
{"text":"This interview was made in 1989 and published more than one time as a journal article. It was included in the Derrida's 1992 book \"Points de suspension. Entretiens\", as section XIV. The English edition of \"Points de suspension. Entretiens\", titled \"\" (1995), contained the interview at pp.\u00a0228\u2013254, as the final part of the chapter \"Autobiophotographies\"."}
{"text":"Neurobiologist and anti-drug activist Rita Levi Montalcini, which a few months earlier was the protagonist of an anti-drug TV ad campaign, was bothered by Derrida's work and commented: \"Those [substances] that we call drugs are substances that are well identified both on the pharmacological-botanical level and on the behavioural level\"."}
{"text":"Les Paradis Artificiels (\"Artificial Paradises\") is a book by French poet Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1860, about the state of being under the influence of opium and hashish. Baudelaire describes the effects of the drugs and discusses the way in which they could theoretically aid mankind in reaching an \"ideal\" world. The text was influenced by Thomas de Quincey's \"Confessions of an English Opium-Eater\" and \"Suspiria de Profundis\"."}
{"text":"Baudelaire analyzes the motivation of the addict, and the individual psychedelic experience of the user. His descriptions have foreshadowed other such work that emerged later in the 1960s regarding LSD."}
{"text":"Hidden Harvest is a 2014 book by Canadian author Mark Coakley that depicts an illegal drug conspiracy in Canada that was involved in the creation of a gigantic cannabis garden in Barrie, Ontario, concealed inside an abandoned Molson beer factory. The \"Toronto Star\" called \"Hidden Harvest\" \"thoroughly researched, entertaining \u2026 real, sometimes humorous and very Canadian\"; a review in Toronto's \"Now\" was sub-titled, \"Buy the Book\". On June 16, 2014, Coakley was interviewed on CBC Radio's \"The Current\" about \"Hidden Harvest\"."}
{"text":"Thai Stick \u2013 Surfers, Scammers and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade is a 2013 book by Peter H. Maguire about the illicit cannabis trade in Southeast Asia. The book was published by Columbia University Press, and in 2015, it was optioned by surfing competitor Kelly Slater to become a documentary film and television series."}
{"text":"The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World is a 2001 nonfiction book by journalist Michael Pollan. Pollan presents case studies that mirror four types of human desires that are reflected in the way that we selectively grow, breed, and genetically engineer our plants. The tulip, beauty; marijuana, intoxication; the apple, sweetness; and the potato, control."}
{"text":"The stories range from the true story of Johnny Appleseed to Pollan's first-hand research with sophisticated marijuana hybrids in Amsterdam to the paradigm-shifting possibilities of genetically engineered potatoes. Pollan also discusses the limitations of monoculture agriculture: specifically, the adoption in Ireland of a single breed of potato (the Irish Lumper) which made the Irish vulnerable to a fungus to which the breed had no resistance, resulting in the Great Famine. The Peruvians from whom the Irish had gotten the potato grew hundreds of varieties, so their exposure to any given pest was slight."}
{"text":"The book was used as the basis for \"The Botany of Desire\", a two-hour program broadcast by PBS."}
{"text":"Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America is a 2015 book written by Bruce Barcott and published by Time Books."}
{"text":"Romancing Mary Jane: A Year in the Life of a Failed Marijuana Grower is a non-fiction book, written by Canadian writer Michael Poole, first published in 1998 by Greystone Books. In the book, the author chronicles the regrettable consequences of his decision to cultivate marijuana on a commercial level. Goodreads called the book, an \"engaging blend of metaphysics, marijuana, and midlife crisis.\" A panel of Wilfrid Laurier University judges called Poole's writing, \"sheer competence\"."}
{"text":"\"Romancing Mary Jane\" received the 1998 \"Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction\"."}
{"text":"This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America is a 2009 nonfiction book by Ryan Grim. Topics covered include the prohibition of LSD and anti-cannabis public service announcements. \"Publishers Weekly\" said it was a \"sharp critique of anti-drug programs\". \"The Austin Chronicle\" recommended it as a holiday gift for \"the hard-to-buy-for drug policy reformer on your list\". It has been required reading in university public health curricula, and cited in a RAND Corporation drug policy research paper."}
{"text":"Craft Weed: Family Farming and the Future of the Marijuana Industry is a 2018 MIT Press book by Ryan Stoa. In it, he argues for an American cannabis industry that looks more like the craft beer industry, and less like \"Big Marijuana\" equivalent of Anheuser-Busch. The author is an associate professor of law at Concordia University School of Law in Boise, Idaho."}
{"text":"A review in \"The Times Literary Supplement\" said the book author's \"expertise is undeniable\" but \"some of his deeper trawls through legislature slow an otherwise intriguing narrative\". Another review found merit in Stoa's advocacy for agricultural law reform around craft cannabis, to include an appellation system for cannabis parallel to that of the American Viticultural Areas (AVAs)."}
{"text":"A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition is a non-fiction book about cannabis by investigative journalists Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian, published by The New Press in 2014."}
{"text":"Marihuana Reconsidered is a 1971 book by Lester Grinspoon about the effects of marijuana and its place in society, first published by Harvard University Press."}
{"text":"The book has received reviews from publications including \"Kirkus Reviews\", \"JAMA\", \"Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics\", \"The New England Journal of Medicine\", and \"The New York Times\"."}
{"text":"The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis is a 2010 book about cannabis edited by Julie Holland M.D., a United States psychiatrist specializing in psychopharmacology. Holland has stated that proceeds from the book's sales will be used to fund further research on cannabis, which she has concluded has therapeutic agents able to induce apoptosis for cancer therapy, and other properties. Holland has also stated that humans and cannabis coevolved."}
{"text":"Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market is a book written by Eric Schlosser and published in 2003. The book is a look at the three pillars of the underground economy of the United States, estimated by Schlosser to be ten percent of U.S. GDP: marijuana, migrant labor, and pornography."}
{"text":"The book is divided into three chapters:"}
{"text":"Chapter 1: \"Reefer Madness\", Schlosser argues, based on usage, historical context, and consequences, for the decriminalization of marijuana."}
{"text":"Chapter 2: \"In the Strawberry Fields\", he explores the exploitation of illegal aliens as cheap labor, arguing that there should be better living arrangements and humane treatment of the illegal aliens the U.S. is exploiting in the fields of California."}
{"text":"Chapter 3: \"An Empire of the Obscene\" details the history of pornography in U.S. culture, starting with the eventual business magnate Reuben Sturman. Schlosser closes by arguing that such a widespread black market can only undermine the law and is indicative of the discrepancy between accepted mainstream U.S. culture and its true nature."}
{"text":"The Emperor Wears No Clothes is a non-fiction book written by Jack Herer. Starting in 1973, the story begins when Herer takes the advice of his friend, \"Captain\" Ed Adair, and begins compiling tidbits of information about the \"Cannabis\" plant and its numerous uses, including as hemp and as a drug. After a dozen years of collecting and compiling historical data, Herer first published his work as \"The Emperor Wears No Clothes\", in 1985. The twelfth edition was published in November 2010, and the book continues to be cited in Cannabis rescheduling and re-legalization efforts."}
{"text":"The book, backed by H.E.M.P. (United States), Hanf Haus (Germany), Sensi Seeds\/Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum, Amsterdam, (Netherlands), and T.H.C., the Texas Hemp Campaign (United States), offers $100,000 to anyone who can disprove the claims made within. Quoting from the book's back cover:"}
{"text":"The title of the book alludes to Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale \"The Emperor's New Clothes\" (1837). Herer uses Andersen's story as an allegory for the current prohibition of Cannabis."}
{"text":"Weed Land: Inside America's Marijuana Epicenter and How Pot Went Legit is a non-fiction book about cannabis by Peter Hecht, published by University of California Press in March 2014. The book's first chapter covers the Drug Enforcement Administration's raid of the Wo\/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, California."}
{"text":"Higher Etiquette: A Guide to the World of Cannabis, From Dispensaries to Dinner Parties is a book about cannabis etiquette by Lizzie Post."}
{"text":"\"Publishers Weekly\" said, \"Those new to the cannabis scene, or those curious about it, would do well to check out Post's work, directed as it is to a more enjoyable and stress-free experience for all involved.\""}
{"text":"Too High to Fail is a book about cannabis by Doug Fine, published by Gotham Books in 2012, describing Northern California's legal cannabis industry."}
{"text":"During the 1970s the library grew rapidly and operated out of San Francisco as an international resource for psychoactive drug research, and for the study of psychoactive drug use in contemporary and historical societies. The Ludlow Library flourished during a period of perhaps the most intense media interest ever focused on the personal, social, scientific and political aspects of drug experience. The Library helped hundreds of writers, filmmakers, and news media researchers collect accurate historical information on cannabis, the opiates, coca and cocaine, and psychedelics for their publications."}
{"text":"The library was curated by Michael R. Aldrich, holder of the first Ph.D. ever granted from an American university in the mythology and folklore of cannabis (SUNY-Buffalo, 1970), and he and his wife Michelle Aldrich joined the co-founders as members of the Board of Directors in 1974. The Library's advisory Board of Trustees included a number of eminent researchers and writers, including Chauncey Leake, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Alexander Shulgin, Andrew Weil, Oscar Janiger, Ralph Metzner, Laura Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Weston LaBarre, R. Gordon Wasson, Tod H. Mikuriya, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti."}
{"text":"\"The Man with the Twisted Lip\", one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the sixth of the twelve stories in \"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\". The story was first published in the \"Strand Magazine\" in December 1891. Doyle ranked \"The Man with the Twisted Lip\" sixteenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories."}
{"text":"The story begins when a friend of Dr. Watson's wife comes to Watson's house, frantic because her husband, who is addicted to opium, has gone missing. Watson helps her pull him out of the opium den and sends him home. Watson is surprised to find that Sherlock Holmes is there too, in disguise and trying to get information to solve a different case about a man who has disappeared. Watson stays to listen to Holmes tell the story of the case of Neville St. Clair."}
{"text":"St. Clair is a prosperous, respectable, punctual man. His family's home is in the country, but he visits London every day on business. One day when Mr. St. Clair was in London, Mrs. St. Clair also went to London separately. She happened to pass down Upper Swandam Lane, a \"vile alley\" near the London docks, where the opium den is. Glancing up, she saw her husband at a second-floor window of the opium den. He vanished from the window immediately, and Mrs. St. Clair was sure that there was something wrong."}
{"text":"She tried to enter the building; but her way was blocked by the opium den's owner, a lascar. She fetched the police, but they did not find Mr. St. Clair. The room behind the window was the lair of a dirty, disfigured beggar, known to the police as Hugh Boone. The police were about to put her story down as a mistake of some kind when Mrs. St. Clair noticed a box of wooden toy bricks that her husband said he would buy for their son. A further search turned up some of St. Clair's clothes. Later, his coat, with the pockets stuffed with hundreds of pennies and halfpennies, was found on the bank of the River Thames, just below the building's back window."}
{"text":"Hugh Boone was arrested at once, but would say nothing, except to deny any knowledge of St. Clair. He also resisted any attempt to make him wash. Holmes was initially quite convinced that St. Clair had been murdered, and that Boone was involved. Thus he investigated the den in disguise. He and Watson return to St. Clair's home, to a surprise. It is several days after the disappearance; but on that day Mrs. St. Clair had received a letter from her husband in his own handwriting, with his wedding ring enclosed, telling her not to worry. This forces Holmes to reconsider his conclusions, leading him eventually to an extraordinary solution."}
{"text":"Holmes and Watson go the police station where Hugh Boone is held; Holmes brings a bath sponge in a Gladstone bag. Finding Boone asleep, Holmes washes the sleeping Boone's dirty face\u2014revealing Neville St. Clair."}
{"text":"The ability of St. Clair to earn a good living begging is considered by some to be an unlikely event, but others disagree."}
{"text":"The morning the mystery is solved Watson awakes about 4:25\u00a0a.m., yet the summer sun is said to shine brightly already."}
{"text":"In one in-universe point of interest, Watson's wife Mary calls him by the name \"James\" despite his established first name being \"John\". This led Dorothy L. Sayers to speculate that Mary may be using his middle name Hamish (an Anglicisation of \"Sheumais\", the vocative form of \"Seumas\", the Scottish Gaelic for James), though Doyle himself never addresses this beyond including the initial."}
{"text":"\"The Man with the Twisted Lip\" was first published in the UK in \"The Strand Magazine\" in December 1891, and in the United States in the US edition of the \"Strand\" in January 1892. The story was published with ten illustrations by Sidney Paget in \"The Strand Magazine\". It was included in the short story collection \"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\", which was published in October 1892."}
{"text":"A silent short film version of the story titled \"The Man with the Twisted Lip\" was released in 1921. It was made as part of the Stoll film series starring Eille Norwood as Holmes."}
{"text":"In 1951, Rudolph Cartier produced an adaptation entitled \"The Man Who Disappeared\". This adaptation was a pilot for a proposed television series starring John Longden as Holmes and Campbell Singer as Watson."}
{"text":"In 1964, the story was adapted into an episode of the BBC series \"Sherlock Holmes\" starring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock, with Peter Madden as Inspector Lestrade and Anton Rodgers as Neville St Clair. The adaptation developed St Clair's attributed ability at repartee by showing him quoting from the classics, including Shakespeare."}
{"text":"Granada Television also produced a version in 1986, adapted by Alan Plater as part of their \"The Return of Sherlock Holmes\" television series, starring Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke, with Denis Lill as Inspector Bradstreet, Clive Francis as Neville St. Clair, and Albert Moses as the Lascar."}
{"text":"An episode of the animated television series \"Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century\" was adapted from the story. The episode, titled \"The Man with the Twisted Lip\", aired in 2000."}
{"text":"The 2014 \"Sherlock\" episode \"His Last Vow\" begins with Sherlock being found in a drug den by John, reminiscent of the scene in the opium den from this story."}
{"text":"Edith Meiser adapted the story as an episode of the American radio series \"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\", which aired on 24 November 1930, starring Richard Gordon as Sherlock Holmes and Leigh Lovell as Dr. Watson. Remakes of the script aired on 12 May 1935 (with Louis Hector as Holmes and Lovell as Watson) and 22 February 1936 (with Gordon as Holmes and Harry West as Watson)."}
{"text":"Meiser also adapted the story as an episode of the American radio series \"The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\", with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson, that aired on 23 October 1939. Other episodes in the same series that were adapted from the story aired in 1940, 1943, 1944, and 1946 (with Frederick Worlock as Neville St Clair and Herbert Rawlinson as Inspector Bradstreet)."}
{"text":"A radio adaptation aired on the BBC Light Programme in 1959, as part of the 1952\u20131969 radio series starring Carleton Hobbs as Holmes and Norman Shelley as Watson. It was adapted by Michael Hardwick."}
{"text":"\"The Man with the Twisted Lip\" was dramatised by Peter Mackie for BBC Radio 4 in 1990, as part of the 1989\u20131998 radio series starring Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson."}
{"text":"The story was adapted as an episode of \"The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes\", a series on the American radio show \"Imagination Theatre\", with John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes and Lawrence Albert as Watson. The episode first aired in 2012."}
{"text":"The Acid House is a 1994 book by Irvine Welsh, later made into a film of the same name. It is a collection of 22 short stories, with each story (between three and 20 pages) featuring a new set of characters and scenarios."}
{"text":"The 1998 film, \"The Acid House\", directed by Paul McGuigan, dramatizes 3 of the 22 stories from the book - \"The Granton Star Cause\", \"A Soft Touch\", and \"The Acid House\"."}
{"text":"Ten Stories About Smoking is the debut short story collection by writer Stuart Evers."}
{"text":"\"Getting Real\" is a science fiction short story by American writer Harry Turtledove, published in the March 2009 issue of \"Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine\"."}
{"text":"The short story takes place in a run down Los Angeles, California in the year 2117 where the United States is no longer a world power but an \"economic basket case\" ever since China refused to renew its loans to the government a century earlier. As a result, China becomes the world's largest military and economic power, in addition in leading the world in technological research and development."}
{"text":"In an earlier conflict a generation prior to the setting of the short story, China took over Catalina Island and the California Channel Islands."}
{"text":"The US began its offensive with air-strikes by F-27 aircraft on the Channel Islands, particularly Catalina Island off the coast from Los Angeles. The F-27 was the latest United States Air Force air superiority fighter aircraft. It first entered service in the 2050s but constant upgrades in weaponry, avionics and stealthiness kept it state of the art. With afterburner and strap-on rocket packs, an F-27 could climb to the edge of space. However, the Chinese demonstrated the defensive capabilities of meta-reality technology by defeating the attack. Avatars appeared in the cockpits of the aircraft and forced Real onto the pilots. This established control over their senses and deceived the pilots into crashing their aircraft."}
{"text":"The US resorted to sending the Navy to attack the islands. Warships, using elaborate spoofing, approached the Chinese holding in order to shell them. However, the Chinese again used meta reality technology, this time more directly. For instance, the USS \"Rumsfeld\" (named after Donald Rumsfeld) ran into a giant brick wall at flank speed, causing enough damage to sink it."}
{"text":"Hu Zhiaoxing met with his US counterparts via video conference and indicated that the US attacks were ineffective. He offered relatively soft terms for peace, which included that the US allow Chinese distribution of Real without legal penalty, Chinese citizens arrested in the United States be tried in Chinese courts to ensure fairness, and that the US pay a moderate indemnity. American officials rejected the terms and the war continued."}
{"text":"The Chinese launched a punitive raid on Los Angeles. First all power and telephone services (both cell and landlines) were cut off. Then avatars appeared throughout the city warning the residents to evacuate the city. Two and a half hours later, what appeared to be a giant Pyrex bowl covered the city. However, it is impervious to missile and artillery fire. Then, what appeared to be lightning began causing random damage within the bowl."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, companies of conventionally armed Chinese soldiers entered the city. They left the LA citizens alone unless they offered resistance, though a surprisingly large number were armed and not surprisingly angry. In addition, American soldiers trapped within the bowl were allowed to surrender unless they too offered more than token resistance."}
{"text":"Those actions insured that the U.S. would continue its decline."}
{"text":"\"Faith of Our Fathers\" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in the anthology \"Dangerous Visions\" (1967)."}
{"text":"Tung Chien is a Vietnamese bureaucrat in a world that has been conquered by Chinese-style atheist communism, where the population is kept docile with hallucinogenic drugs. When a street vendor gives Tung an illegal anti-hallucinogen, he discovers that the Party leader has a horrible secret."}
{"text":"Algis Budrys said that \"the first three-quarters of (the) story appear to be very good\", and that although \"Dick knows his hallucinogens very well\", unlike the superb \"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch\", in \"Faith of Our Fathers\" \"he makes sense only to himself\"."}
{"text":"\"Faith of Our Fathers\" was nominated for the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novelette."}
{"text":"Pollen is a 1995 science fiction novel written by British author Jeff Noon."}
{"text":"\"Pollen\" is the sequel to \"Vurt\" and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the virtual world. When concerning the virtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn). The novel is set in Manchester."}
{"text":"Noon is said to take his inspiration from music. While working on \"Pollen,\" he often listened to \u2018Dream of a 100 Nations\u2019 album by Transglobal Underground on repeat.\"Things changed for my second novel, Pollen: by then I had really discovered the melancholic joys of house and techno music, and I think the novel reflects that change. Pollen is a much more tangled book, more fertile, a very overgrown, edge-of-wilderness narrative.\""}
{"text":"Needle in the Groove is a 1999 novel by Jeff Noon. A music\/spoken word CD was released on the same day as the book."}
{"text":"It tells its story through the eyes of Elliot, a young twenty-something bassist, as he finds himself playing bass for Glam Damage, a new DJ-based band who are experimenting with a new recording technology - a weird liquid\/drug that remixes music when shaken."}
{"text":"Previous readers of Noon will be in familiar territory, the book is set in the near future of Manchester 2002, and the drugs as music metaphor is the essence of the novel. Eschewing conventional punctuation, capitalisation and grammar, the book reads as if it is a series of song lyrics."}
{"text":"The book also traces the history of pop music in Manchester, starting with skiffle in 1957, running through the sixties, before coming to an angry explosion with the punk of 1977 and the Buzzcocks. This love for music is also expressed by the names of the streets. Poking fun at the increasing excesses taken towards marketing our heritage, Manchester streets have been renamed after Mancunian bands and musicians. So we are given Ian Curtis Boulevard, a street called Gerald, Bee Gees Avenue and even Northern Uproar cul-de-sac."}
{"text":"This was Noon's farewell book to Manchester, before he moved to Brighton, and, for the time being, seems to be the last set in the Vurt\/Manchester universe. His next work, \"Falling Out of Cars\" is his first not to be set in that city."}
{"text":"Released on the same as the book was the musical version of \"Needle in the Groove\". The CD was produced by both Jeff Noon and David Toop. The music is experimental\/ industrial and backs Noon speaking lines from the \"Needle in the Groove\" book."}
{"text":"The CD was originally available from the \"Needle in the Groove\" website (now offline) for \u00a310. Now, the CD is available in very limited amounts as there has only been one pressing of the album."}
{"text":"Olive, Again is a novel by the American author Elizabeth Strout. The book was published by Random House on October 15, 2019. It is a sequel to \"Olive Kitteridge\" (2008), which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2019, the novel was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club. Similar to the first novel, \"Olive, Again\" takes the form of 13 short stories that are interrelated but discontinuous in terms of narrative. It follows Olive Kitteridge from her seventies into her eighties."}
{"text":"Jack Kennison, a seventy-four-year-old widower and retired Harvard professor, drives to Portland to buy whiskey to avoid the possibility of running into Olive, who he has since separated from, at the grocery store in Crosby. Jack is pulled over by the police and given a ticket for speeding."}
{"text":"Olive attends a \"stupid\" baby shower. One of the pregnant guests goes into labor and Olive attempts to drive her to the hospital, but finds herself having to deliver the stranger's baby in the back of her own car."}
{"text":"Olive invites her son Christopher, a podiatrist living in New York, to finally come visit Crosby with his wife, Ann, and their four children. Olive reveals her plans to marry Jack and Christopher expresses disbelief and anger. When Jack comes to meet Christopher and his family the next day, Christopher expresses anger at his mother but is quickly chastised by his wife. Christopher immediately apologizes and appears \"pale as paper\", though Olive feels pity for her son. Olive recalls yelling at her late husband Henry in public similar to how Ann yelled at Christopher. Olive reflects that she has \"failed on a colossal level\" with both Henry and their son Christopher and has \"lived her life as though blind.\""}
{"text":"Suzanne Larkin returns to Crosby, where her childhood home recently burned down with her father having died in the process. Suzanne finds a platonic consolation through conversations with her father's lawyer, Bernie. Bernie's compassion and empathy make a grieving Suzanne feel \"as though huge windows above her had been smashed\u2014the way the firemen must have smashed the windows of her childhood home\u2014 and now, here above her and around her, was the whole wide world right there, available to her once again.\" Bernie feels a similar connection to Suzanne, and is astonished by her \"uncorrupted\" nature."}
{"text":"Olive encounters a former student of hers, Cindy Coombs, while grocery shopping. Coombs, who previously worked as a librarian, is gravely ill. Olive visits her unannounced one day and continues to see her afterwards. The two discuss mortality, and Olive confesses her \"pretty awful\" treatment of Henry. She says that she has become \"a tiny \u2014 tiny \u2014 bit better as a person\" but feels sick that Henry is not alive to receive her that way. The story's title refers to Cindy and Olive's mutual appreciation for the light in February: \"how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees.\""}
{"text":"Sixty-nine-year-old Denny Pelletier is walking alone one night in December in Crosby. He thinks something is wrong with his children but can't think of the answer. He reminisces about his childhood, his own children, his first love Dorothy Paige, and finally his wife Marie Levesque. Denny stumbles upon a man bent over a bench and calls the police, who arrive and intervene by injecting him with Naloxone. Denny walks home and realizes it is with himself that something is wrong, that he had been \"saddened by the waning of his life, and yet it was not over.\" When he returns home and is greeted by his wife Marie."}
{"text":"Olive gets her first pedicure. Jack contemplates his late wife, Betsy, and his affair with Elaine Croft. He thinks of and is frightened by \"how much of his life he had lived"}
{"text":"without knowing who he was or what he was doing.\""}
{"text":"Jim, Bob and Susan Burgess \u2014 the siblings from \"The Burgess Boys\" (2013) \u2014 reunite in nearby Shirley Falls. The brothers' wives, Helen and Margaret, do not like one another. One evening, after drinking wine, Helen finds herself falling down the stairs and breaking several bones. Following Helen's accident, Margaret confesses to her husband that \"I couldn't stand her and she knew it, Bob. And I feel terrible.\" It is also revealed that Bob Burgess and his wife know Olive."}
{"text":"Olive, now eighty-two years old, drives to the coffee shop in Crosby. She runs into a former student of hers, Andrea L'Rieux, who went on to become the United States Poet Laureate. Olive and Jack take a trip to Oslo, Norway. Later, in autumn, Jack dies in his sleep beside her. The following May, Olive is anonymously sent a poem written by Andrea that is based on their encounter. She is initially offended by Andrea's characterization of Olive as lonely. However, Olive eventually admits, \"Andrea had gotten it better than she had, the experience of being another.\""}
{"text":"\"The End of the Civil War Days\"."}
{"text":"Married couple Fergus and Ethel MacPherson live on the outskirts of Crosby and have been married for forty-two years. Though, the two have barely spoken to each other in the last thirty-five years. They have lived with yellow duct tape separating their house ever since Fergus had an affair. Their silence and separation is somewhat broken when their daughter, Laurie, returns from Portland to tell them she has become a dominatrix and is the star of a new documentary. The story draws parallels between the performance aspect of Fergus' Civil War reenactments with their daughter's work as a dominatrix."}
{"text":"Olive, eighty-three years old, suffers a heart attack in her hairdresser's driveway. She is assigned round-the-clock care in her home by nurse's aides. Olive befriends two of the nurses: Betty, a Trump supporter, and Halima, the daughter of a Somali refugee. Christopher visits Olive frequently and eventually helps her get into Maple Tree Apartments, an assisted living facility."}
{"text":"In Maple Tree Apartments, Olive befriends Isabelle Daignault \u2014 the mother from \"Amy and Isabelle\" (1999). The two form a close friendship, caring for one another. Isabelle reflects with regret and shame for cutting off her daughters hair, saying to Olive, \"The memory haunts me.\" Olive's oldest age mentioned in the novel is eighty-six-year-old."}
{"text":"Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by American writer Hubert Selby Jr., that concerns four New Yorkers whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions."}
{"text":"This story follows the lives of Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion Silver, and his best friend Tyrone C. Love, who are all searching for the key to their dreams in their own ways. In the process, they fall into devastating lives of addiction. Harry and Marion are in love and want to open their own business; their friend Tyrone wants to escape life in the ghetto. To achieve these dreams, they buy a large amount of heroin, planning to get rich by selling it."}
{"text":"Sara, Harry's lonely widowed mother, dreams of being on television. When a phone call from a reality show casting company gets her hopes up, she goes to a doctor, who gives her diet pills to lose weight. She spends the next few months on the pills, wanting desperately to look thin on TV and fit into a red dress from her younger days. However, the casting company does not notify her about the details of her show. She becomes addicted to the diet pills and eventually develops amphetamine psychosis after her life continues to go downhill. She eventually ends up in a mental institution, where she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)."}
{"text":"Harry, Marion, and Tyrone become addicted to their own product. Eventually, when heroin becomes scarce, they turn on each other, slowly hiding the drugs they obtain from the other two members. On their way to Miami, Harry and Tyrone are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to jail. Harry's arm has become infected from repeated injections, and has to be amputated. Left alone, Marion becomes a prostitute to support her addiction. In jail, Tyrone faces frequent abuse from the guards due to his race."}
{"text":"The novel was later adapted into a critically acclaimed eponymous film, released in 2000. The film was directed by Darren Aronofsky and stars Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Sara."}
{"text":"Lullabies for Little Criminals is a 2006 novel by Heather O'Neill."}
{"text":"The book was chosen for inclusion in the 2007 edition of \"Canada Reads\", where it was championed by musician John K. Samson. \"Lullabies for Little Criminals\" won the competition."}
{"text":"(Includes Spoilers) The novel revolves around the twelve-year-old protagonist named Baby and follows her for two years. Baby lives with her father Jules, who has a worsening heroin addiction. The two move frequently, to various places around Montreal, where they encounter many other characters, among them junkies, bums, pimps, and abused children."}
{"text":"Baby was born while Jules was in high school with her mother, who died soon after Baby was born, though the cause of death is not revealed immediately."}
{"text":"Jules often leaves young Baby by herself wherever they may be living, for anywhere from a week to over a month at a time. Baby becomes distraught and finds herself wandering the streets of Montreal on her own. She is eventually taken away by Child Protective Services and put into a foster home while Jules is in the hospital with tuberculosis. There she makes friends with two boys, Linus Lucas, a 14-year-old who all the children think is the very height of cool, and Zachary, a mellow, happy 12-year-old. When Jules finally picks her up, he promises that everything will return to normal."}
{"text":"Baby goes back to school while still prostituting herself and meets an odd boy named Xavier. Xavier and Baby slowly but surely become closer and begin to date. As their relationship grows, they become very intimate, and have sex at Alphonse's hotel room, the only place they can be alone. When Alphonse returns to find them there, he beats Xavier and sends him home. Alphonse then beats Baby and takes all of her heroin. When Baby wakes up the next morning, she finds Alphonse dead of a drug overdose."}
{"text":"Baby leaves Alphonse's room and is left with nowhere to go. She decides to go to a nearby homeless shelter where she had heard that Jules was staying. They embrace, and Jules explains that he has set up a place to stay with his cousin. They pack up and walk to the local bus station. On the bus, Jules explains that Baby's mother died in a car crash while Jules was driving. The other driver was drunk at the time."}
{"text":"Upon arrival at Jules' cousin's house in Val des Loups, the story ends."}
{"text":"LULLABIES FOR LITTLE CRIMINALS. (2006). Kirkus Reviews, 74(15), 747."}
{"text":"Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, \"Brave New World Revisited\" (1958), and with his final novel, \"Island\" (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's \"Nineteen Eighty-Four\" (published 1949)."}
{"text":"In 1999, the Modern Library ranked \"Brave New World\" at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for \"The Observer\", included \"Brave New World\" chronologically at number 53 in \"the top 100 greatest novels of all time\", and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC."}
{"text":"The title \"Brave New World\" derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's \"The Tempest\", Act V, Scene I:"}
{"text":"Shakespeare's use of the phrase is intended ironically, as the speaker is failing to recognise the evil nature of the island's visitors because of her innocence."}
{"text":"Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature: the French edition of the work is entitled \"Le Meilleur des mondes\" (\"The Best of All Worlds\"), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and satirised in \"Candide, Ou l'Optimisme\" by Voltaire (1759)."}
{"text":"Huxley wrote \"Brave New World\" while living in Sanary-sur-Mer, France, in the four months from May to August 1931. By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist. He was a contributor to \"Vanity Fair\" and \"Vogue\" magazines, and had published a collection of his poetry (\"The Burning Wheel\", 1916) and four successful satirical novels: \"Crome Yellow\" (1921), \"Antic Hay\" (1923), \"Those Barren Leaves\" (1925), and \"Point Counter Point\" (1928). \"Brave New World\" was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work."}
{"text":"A passage in \"Crome Yellow\" contains a brief pre-figuring of \"Brave New World\", showing that Huxley had such a future in mind already in 1921. Mr. Scogan, one of the earlier book's characters, describes an \"impersonal generation\" of the future that will \"take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.\""}
{"text":"The scientific futurism in \"Brave New World\" is believed to be appropriated from \"Daedalus\" by J. B. S. Haldane."}
{"text":"The events of the Depression in the UK in 1931, with its mass unemployment and the abandonment of the gold currency standard, persuaded Huxley to assert that stability was the \"primal and ultimate need\" if civilisation was to survive the present crisis. The \"Brave New World\" character Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, is named after Sir Alfred Mond. Shortly before writing the novel, Huxley visited Mond's technologically advanced plant near Billingham, north east England, and it made a great impression on him."}
{"text":"Huxley used the setting and characters in his science fiction novel to express widely felt anxieties, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave \"Brave New World\" much of its character. Huxley was outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, and sexual promiscuity, and the inward-looking nature of many Americans; he had also found the book \"My Life and Work\" by Henry Ford on the boat to America, and he saw the book's principles applied in everything he encountered after leaving San Francisco."}
{"text":"Jaded with his new life, John moves to an abandoned hilltop tower, near the village of Puttenham, where he intends to adopt a solitary ascetic lifestyle in order to purify himself of civilization, practising self-flagellation. This soon draws reporters and eventually hundreds of amazed sightseers, hoping to witness his bizarre behaviour; one of them is implied to be Lenina. At the sight of the woman he both adores and loathes, John attacks her with his whip. The onlookers are wildly aroused by the display and John is caught up in the crowd's soma-fuelled frenzy. The next morning, he remembers the previous night's events and is stricken with remorse. Onlookers and journalists who arrive that evening discover John dead, having hanged himself."}
{"text":"Helmholtz Watson, a handsome and successful Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering and a friend of Bernard. He feels unfulfilled writing endless propaganda doggerel, and the stifling conformism and philistinism of the World State make him restive. Helmholtz is ultimately exiled to the Falkland Islands\u2014a cold asylum for disaffected Alpha-Plus non-conformists\u2014after reading a heretical poem to his students on the virtues of solitude and helping John destroy some Deltas' rations of soma following Linda's death. Unlike Bernard, he takes his exile in his stride and comes to view it as an opportunity for inspiration in his writing."}
{"text":"Fanny Crowne, Lenina Crowne's friend (they have the same last name because only ten thousand last names are in use in a World State comprising two billion people). Fanny voices the conventional values of her caste and society, particularly the importance of promiscuity: she advises Lenina that she should have more than one man in her life because it is unseemly to concentrate on just one. Fanny then, however, warns Lenina away from a new lover whom she considers undeserving, yet she is ultimately supportive of the young woman's attraction to the savage John."}
{"text":"Henry Foster, one of Lenina's many lovers, he is a perfectly conventional Alpha male, casually discussing Lenina's body with his coworkers. His success with Lenina, and his casual attitude about it, infuriate the jealous Bernard. Henry ultimately proves himself every bit the ideal World State citizen, finding no courage to defend Lenina from John's assaults despite having maintained an uncommonly longstanding sexual relationship with her."}
{"text":"Benito Hoover, another of Lenina's lovers. She remembers that he is particularly hairy when he takes his clothes off."}
{"text":"The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (DHC), also known as Thomas \"Tomakin\" Grahambell, he is the administrator of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where he is a threatening figure who intends to exile Bernard to Iceland. His plans take an unexpected turn, however, when Bernard returns from the Reservation with Linda (see below) and John, a child they both realize is actually his. This fact, scandalous and obscene in the World State not because it was extramarital (which all sexual acts are) but because it was procreative, leads the Director to resign his post in shame."}
{"text":"The Arch-Community-Songster, the secular equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the World State society. He takes personal offense when John refuses to attend Bernard's party."}
{"text":"The Director of Crematoria and Phosphorus Reclamation, one of the many disappointed, important figures to attend Bernard's party."}
{"text":"The Warden, an Alpha-Minus, the talkative chief administrator for the New Mexico Savage Reservation. He is blond, short, broad-shouldered, and has a booming voice."}
{"text":"Darwin Bonaparte, a \"big game photographer\" (i.e. filmmaker) who films John flogging himself. Darwin Bonaparte is known for two other works: \"feely of the gorillas' wedding\", and \"Sperm Whale's Love-life\". He has already made a name for himself but still seeks more. He renews his fame by filming the savage, John, in his newest release \"The Savage of Surrey\". His name alludes to Charles Darwin and Napoleon Bonaparte."}
{"text":"Dr. Shaw, Bernard Marx's physician who consequently becomes the physician of both Linda and John. He prescribes a lethal dose of soma to Linda, which will stop her respiratory system from functioning in a span of one to two months, at her own behest but not without protest from John. Ultimately, they all agree that it is for the best, since denying her this request would cause more trouble for Society and Linda herself."}
{"text":"Dr. Gaffney, Provost of Eton, an Upper School for high-caste individuals. He shows Bernard and John around the classrooms, and the Hypnopaedic Control Room (used for behavioural conditioning through sleep learning). John asks if the students read Shakespeare but the Provost says the library contains only reference books because solitary activities, such as reading, are discouraged."}
{"text":"Miss Keate, Head Mistress of Eton Upper School. Bernard fancies her, and arranges an assignation with her."}
{"text":"These are non-fictional and factual characters who lived before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel:"}
{"text":"The limited number of names that the World State assigned to its bottle-grown citizens can be traced to political and cultural figures who contributed to the bureaucratic, economic, and technological systems of Huxley's age, and presumably those systems in \"Brave New World\"."}
{"text":"Upon publication, Rebecca West praised \"Brave New World\" as \"The most accomplished novel Huxley has yet written\", Joseph Needham lauded it as \"Mr. Huxley's remarkable book\", and Bertrand Russell also praised it, stating, \"Mr. Aldous Huxley has shown his usual masterly skill in \"Brave New World.\"\""}
{"text":"However, \"Brave New World\" also received negative responses from other contemporary critics, although his work was later embraced."}
{"text":"In an article in the 4 May 1935 issue of the \"Illustrated London News\", G. K. Chesterton explained that Huxley was revolting against the \"Age of Utopias\". Much of the discourse on man's future before 1914 was based on the thesis that humanity would solve all economic and social issues. In the decade following the war the discourse shifted to an examination of the causes of the catastrophe. The works of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw on the promises of socialism and a World State were then viewed as the ideas of naive optimists. Chesterton wrote:"}
{"text":"Similarly, in 1944 economist Ludwig von Mises described \"Brave New World\" as a satire of utopian predictions of socialism: \"Aldous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism's dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony.\""}
{"text":"From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called \"hypnop\u00e6dia\" in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called soma."}
{"text":"Comparisons with George Orwell's \" Nineteen Eighty-Four \"."}
{"text":"In a letter to George Orwell about \"Nineteen Eighty-Four\", Huxley wrote \"Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.\" He went on to write \"Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.\""}
{"text":"Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of \"Nineteen Eighty-Four\" and \"Brave New World\" in the foreword of his 1985 book \"Amusing Ourselves to Death\". He writes:"}
{"text":"Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article \"Why Americans Are Not Taught History\":"}
{"text":"Martin Kreutzberg, in his essay on the development of \"Sexual Fantasies and Fantasies About Sex\" during the 19th and 20th Centuries, noted that"}
{"text":"Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Brothers, US, 1958; Chatto & Windus, UK, 1959), written by Huxley almost thirty years after \"Brave New World\", is a non-fiction work in which Huxley considered whether the world had moved toward or away from his vision of the future from the 1930s. He believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future. In \"Brave New World Revisited\", he concluded that the world was becoming like \"Brave New World\" much faster than he originally thought."}
{"text":"Huxley analysed the causes of this, such as overpopulation, as well as all the means by which populations can be controlled. He was particularly interested in the effects of drugs and subliminal suggestion. \"Brave New World Revisited\" is different in tone because of Huxley's evolving thought, as well as his conversion to Hindu Vedanta in the interim between the two books."}
{"text":"The last chapter of the book aims to propose action which could be taken to prevent a democracy from turning into the totalitarian world described in \"Brave New World\". In Huxley's last novel, \"Island\", he again expounds similar ideas to describe a utopian nation, which is generally viewed as a counterpart to \"Brave New World\"."}
{"text":"The American Library Association ranks \"Brave New World\" as No. 34 on their list of most challenged books. The following list includes some incidents in which it has been censored, banned, or challenged:"}
{"text":"The English writer Rose Macaulay published \"What Not: A Prophetic Comedy\" in 1918. \"What Not\" depicts a dystopian future where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. Macaulay and Huxley shared the same literary circles and he attended her weekly literary salons."}
{"text":"George Orwell believed that \"Brave New World\" must have been partly derived from the 1921 novel \"We\" by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote \"Brave New World\" long before he had heard of \"We\". According to \"We\" translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying."}
{"text":"Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing \"Player Piano\" (1952), he \"cheerfully ripped off the plot of \"Brave New World\", whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's \"We\"\"."}
{"text":"In 1982, Polish author Antoni Smuszkiewicz, in his analysis of Polish science-fiction \"Zaczarowana gra\" (\"The Magic Game\"), presented accusations of plagiarism against Huxley. Smuszkiewicz showed similarities between \"Brave New World\" and two science fiction novels written earlier by Polish author Mieczys\u0142aw Smolarski, namely \"Miasto \u015bwiat\u0142o\u015bci\" (\"The City of Light\", 1924) and \"Podr\u00f3\u017c po\u015blubna pana Hamiltona\" (\"Mr Hamilton's Honeymoon Trip\", 1928). Smuszkiewicz wrote in his open letter to Huxley: \"This work of a great author, both in the general depiction of the world as well as countless details, is so similar to two of my novels that in my opinion there is no possibility of accidental analogy.\""}
{"text":"Kate Lohnes, writing for \"Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica\", notes similarities between \"Brave New World\" and other novels of the era could be seen as expressing \"common fears surrounding the rapid advancement of technology and of the shared feelings of many tech-skeptics during the early 20th century\". Other dystopian novels followed Huxley's work, including Orwell's \"Nineteen Eighty-Four\" (1949)."}
{"text":"In 1999, the Modern Library ranked \"Brave New World\" fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for \"The Observer\" included \"Brave New World\" chronologically at number 53 in \"the top 100 greatest novels of all time\", and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read."}
{"text":"On 5 November 2019, the \"BBC News\" listed \"Brave New World\" on its list of the 100 most influential novels."}
{"text":"In May 2015, \"The Hollywood Reporter\" reported that Steven Spielberg's Amblin Television would bring \"Brave New World\" to Syfy network as a scripted series, written (adapted) by Les Bohem. The adaptation was eventually written by David Wiener with Grant Morrison and Brian Taylor, with the series ordered to air on USA Network in February 2019. The series eventually moved to the Peacock streaming service and premiered on 15 July 2020."}
{"text":"Quichotte ( , ) is a 2019 novel by Salman Rushdie. It is his fourteenth novel, published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House. Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel \"Don Quixote\", \"Quichotte\" is a metafiction that tells the story of an addled Indian American man who travels across America in pursuit of a celebrity television host with whom he has become obsessed."}
{"text":"The novel received favourable reviews and was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize."}
{"text":"\"Quichotte\" was published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom and Penguin Books India in India. It was published in the United States on 3 September 2019 by Random House."}
{"text":"The novel debuted at number fifteen on \"The New York Times\" Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list on September 29, 2019."}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" called the novel \"humane and humorous,\" adding that \"Rushdie is in top form, serving up a fine piece of literary satire.\""}
{"text":"\"Publishers Weekly\" called the novel \"a brilliant rendition of the cheesy, sleazy, scary pandemonium of life in modern times.\""}
{"text":"Claire Lowdon of \"The Sunday Times\" gave the novel a rave review, saying, \"\"Quichotte\" is one of the cleverest, most enjoyable metafictional capers this side of postmodernism\" and that \"we are still watching a master at work.\""}
{"text":"In her review for \"The New York Times Book Review\", author Jeanette Winterson said, \"The lovely, unsentimental, heart-affirming ending of Quichotte, that \"sane man,\" is the aslant answer to the question of what is real and what is unreal. A remembrance of what holds our human lives in some equilibrium \u2014 a way of feeling and a way of telling. Love and language.\""}
{"text":"Writing for \"Booklist\", Donna Seaman said, \"Rushdie's dazzling and provocative improvisation on an essential classic has powerful resonance in this time of weaponized lies and denials.\""}
{"text":"Nicholas Mancusi, writing for \"Time\", praised the novel, saying, \"As he weaves the journeys of the two men nearer and nearer, sweeping up a full accounting of all the tragicomic horrors of modern American life in the process, these energies begin to collapse beautifully inward, like a dying star.\""}
{"text":"Writing for \"The Times\", Robert Douglas-Fairhurst praised the novel, calling it a \"welcome return to form. More than just another postmodern box of tricks, this is a novel that feeds the heart while it fills the mind.\""}
{"text":"Jude Cook of \"i\" called the novel a \"wildly entertaining return to form\" and said of Rushdie: \"Now in his eighth decade, it is clear he still possesses the linguistic energy, resourcefulness and sheer amplitude of a writer half his age.\""}
{"text":"Ron Charles, a book critic at \"The Washington Post\", gave the novel a mixed review and wrote, \"Rushdie's style once unfurled with hypnotic elegance, but here it's become a fire hose of brainy gags and literary allusions \u2014 tremendously clever but frequently tedious.\""}
{"text":"Writing for the \"New Statesman\", lead fiction writer Leo Robson panned the novel, calling it \"draining\" and saying, \"We're simply stuck with an author prone to lapses in tact and taste, and a lack of respect for the reader's time or powers of concentration.\""}
{"text":"Insatiability () is a speculative fiction novel by the Polish writer, dramatist, philosopher, painter and photographer, Stanis\u0142aw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). \"Nienasycenie\" was written in 1927 and was first published in 1930. It is Witkiewicz's third novel, considered by many to be his best. The novel consists of two parts: Przebudzenie (Awakening) and Ob\u0142\u0119d (The madness)."}
{"text":"The novel takes place in the future, circa 2000. Following a battle, modeled after the Bolshevik revolution, Poland is overrun by the army of the last and final Mongol conquest. The nation becomes enslaved to the Chinese leader Murti Bing. His emissaries give everyone a special pill called \"DAVAMESK B 2\" which takes away their abilities to think and to mentally resist. East and West become one, in faceless misery fueled by sexual instincts."}
{"text":"Witkiewicz's \"Insatiability\" combines chaotic action with deep philosophical and political discussion, and predicts many of the events and political outcomes of the subsequent years, specifically, the invasion of Poland, the postwar foreign domination as well as the totalitarian mind control exerted, first by the Germans, and then by the Soviet Union on Polish life and art."}
{"text":"Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz frames the first chapter of his book \"The Captive Mind\" around a discussion of \"Insatiability\", specifically the \"Murti-Bing pill,\" which allows artists to contentedly conform to the demands of the equivalent of Socialist Realism."}
{"text":"The novel was translated into English in 1977 by University of Toronto professor of Polish and Russian literature Louis Iribarne and published by Northwestern University Press."}
{"text":"Go Ask Alice is a 1971 diary about a teenage girl who develops a drug addiction at age 15 and runs away from home on a journey of self-destructive escapism. Attributed to \"Anonymous\", the book is in diary form, and was originally presented as being the edited \"real diary\" of the unnamed teenage protagonist. Questions about the book's authenticity and true authorship began to arise in the late 1970s, and it is now generally viewed as a found manuscript-styled fictional work written by Beatrice Sparks, a therapist and author who went on to write numerous other books purporting to be real diaries of troubled teenagers. Some sources have also named Linda Glovach as a co-author of the book."}
{"text":"Intended for a young adult audience, \"Go Ask Alice\" became a widely popular bestseller. It was initially praised for conveying a powerful message about the dangers of drug abuse, but more recently has been criticized as poorly written anti-drug propaganda and also as a literary hoax. Nevertheless, its popularity has endured, and as of 2014 it had remained continuously in print since its publication over four decades earlier. \"Go Ask Alice\" has also ranked among the most frequently challenged books for several decades due to its use of profanity and explicit references to sex and rape, as well as drugs."}
{"text":"The book was adapted into the 1973 television film \"Go Ask Alice\", starring Jamie Smith-Jackson and William Shatner. In 1976, a stage play of the same name, written by Frank Shiras and based on the book, was also published."}
{"text":"The title was taken from a line in the 1967 Grace Slick-penned Jefferson Airplane song \"White Rabbit\" (\"go ask Alice\/ when she's ten feet tall\"); the lyrics in turn reference scenes in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel \"Alice's Adventures In Wonderland\", in which the title character Alice eats and drinks various substances, including a mushroom, that make her grow larger or smaller. Slick's song is understood as using Carroll's story as a metaphor for a drug experience."}
{"text":"In 1968, a 15-year-old girl begins keeping a diary, in which she records her thoughts and concerns about issues such as crushes, weight loss, sexuality, social acceptance, and relating to her parents. The dates and locations mentioned in the book place its events as occurring between 1968 and 1970 in California, Colorado, Oregon, and New York City. The two towns in which the diarist's family reside during the story are not identified, and are only described as being college towns."}
{"text":"Released from the hospital, the diarist returns home, finally free of drugs. She now gets along better with her family, makes new friends, and is romantically involved with Joel, a responsible student from her father's college. She is worried about starting school again, but feels stronger with the support of her new friends and Joel. In an optimistic mood, the diarist decides to stop keeping a diary and instead discuss her problems and thoughts with other people."}
{"text":"The epilogue states that the subject of the book died three weeks after the final entry. The diarist was found dead in her home by her parents when they returned from a movie. She died from a drug overdose, either accidental or premeditated."}
{"text":"The anonymous diarist's name is never revealed in the book. In an episode where the diarist describes having sex with a drug dealer, she quotes an onlooker's remark indicating that her name may be Carla. Although a girl named Alice appears very briefly in the book, she is not the diarist, but a fellow runaway whom the diarist meets on the street in Coos Bay, Oregon."}
{"text":"Despite the lack of any evidence in the book that the diarist's name is Alice, the covers of various editions have suggested that her name is Alice by including blurb text such as \"This is Alice's true story\" and \"You can't ask Alice anything anymore. But you can do something\u2014read her diary.\" Reviewers and commentators have also frequently referred to the anonymous diarist as \"Alice\", sometimes for convenience."}
{"text":"In the 1973 television film based on the book, the protagonist played by Jamie Smith-Jackson is named \"Alice\". The protagonist is also named \"Alice Aberdeen\" in the 1976 stage play adaptation."}
{"text":"The manuscript that later became \"Go Ask Alice\" was initially prepared for publication by Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon therapist and youth counselor then in her early 50s, who had previously done various forms of writing. Sparks had reportedly noted that the general public at that time lacked knowledge about youth drug abuse, and she likely had both educational and moral motives for publishing the book. Sparks later claimed that the book was based on a real diary she received from a real teenage girl, although this claim was never substantiated and the girl has never been identified (see Authorship and veracity controversies)."}
{"text":"With the help of Art Linkletter, a popular talk show host for whom Sparks had worked as a ghostwriter, the manuscript was passed on to Linkletter's literary agent, who sold it to Prentice Hall. Linkletter, who had become a prominent anti-drug crusader after the 1969 suicide of his daughter Diane, also helped publicize the book. Even before its publication, \"Go Ask Alice\" had racked up large advance orders of 18,000 copies."}
{"text":"Upon its 1971 publication, \"Go Ask Alice\" quickly became a publishing sensation and an international bestseller, being translated into 16 languages. Its success has been attributed to the timing of its publication at the height of the psychedelic era, when the negative effects of drug use were becoming a public concern. Alleen Pace Nilsen has called it \"the book that came closest to being a YA phenomenon\" of its time, although saying it was \"never as famous as [the later] \"Harry Potter\", \"Twilight\", and \"Hunger Games\" series\". In addition to being very popular with its intended young adult audience, \"Go Ask Alice\" also attracted a significant number of adult readers."}
{"text":"Libraries had difficulty obtaining and keeping enough copies of the book on the shelves to meet demand. The 1973 television film based on the book heightened reader interest, and librarians reported having to order additional copies of the book each time the film was broadcast."}
{"text":"By 1975, more than three million copies of the book had reportedly been sold, and by 1979 the paperback edition had been reprinted 43 times. The book remained continuously in print over the ensuing decades, with reported sales of over four million copies by 1998, and over five million copies by 2009. The actual number of readers probably surpassed the sales figures, as library copies and even personal copies were likely circulated to more than one reader. \"Go Ask Alice\" has been cited as establishing both the commercial potential of young adult fiction in general, and the genre of young adult anti-drug novels, and has been called \"one of the most famous anti-drug books ever published.\""}
{"text":"Years after its publication, \"Go Ask Alice\" continued to receive some good reviews, often in the context of defending the book against censors (see Censorship). In a 1995 \"Village Voice\" column for Banned Books Week, Nat Hentoff described it as \"an extraordinarily powerful account of what it's actually like to get hooked on drugs\" that \"doesn't preach\"."}
{"text":"Although school boards and committees reached varying conclusions about whether \"Go Ask Alice\" had literary value, educators generally viewed it as a strong cautionary warning against drug use. It was recommended to parents and assigned or distributed in some schools as an anti-drug teaching tool. However, some adults who read the book as teens or pre-teens have written that they paid little attention to the anti-drug message and instead related to the diarist's thoughts and emotions, or vicariously experienced the thrills of her rebellious behavior. Reading the book for such vicarious experience has been suggested as a positive alternative to actually doing drugs. \"Go Ask Alice\" has also been used in curricula dealing with mood swings and death."}
{"text":"Although \"Go Ask Alice\" has been credited to an anonymous author since its publication, and was originally promoted as the real, albeit edited, diary of a real teenage girl, over time the book has come to be regarded by researchers as a fake memoir written by Beatrice Sparks, possibly with the help of one or more co-authors. Despite significant evidence of Sparks' authorship, a percentage of readers and educators have continued to believe that the book is a true-life account of a teenage girl."}
{"text":"\"Go Ask Alice\" was originally published by Prentice Hall in 1971 as the work of an unnamed author \"Anonymous\". The original edition contained a note signed by \"The Editors\" that included the statements, \"\"Go Ask Alice\" is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user...Names, dates, places and certain events have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those concerned.\" The paperback edition first published in 1972 by Avon Books contained the words \"A Real Diary\" on the front cover just above the title, and the same words were included on the front covers of some later editions."}
{"text":"Not long after \"Go Ask Alice\"s publication, Beatrice Sparks began making public appearances presenting herself as the book's editor. (Ellen Roberts, who in the early 1970s was an editor at Prentice Hall, was also credited at that time with having edited the book; a later source refers to Roberts as having \"consulted\" on the book.) According to Caitlin White, when Sparks' name became public, some researchers discovered that copyright records listed Sparks as the sole author\u2014not editor\u2014of the book, raising questions about whether she had written it herself. Suspicions were heightened in 1979 after two newly published books about troubled teenagers (\"Voices\" and \"Jay's Journal\") advertised Sparks' involvement by calling her \"the author who brought you \"Go Ask Alice\"\"."}
{"text":"Urban folklore expert Barbara Mikkelson of snopes.com has written that even before the authorship revelations, ample evidence indicated that \"Go Ask Alice\" was not an actual diary. According to Mikkelson, the writing style and content\u2014including a lengthy description of an LSD trip but relatively little about \"the loss of [the diarist's] one true love\", school, gossip or ordinary \"chit-chat\"\u2014 seems uncharacteristic of a teenage girl's diary. The sophisticated vocabulary of the diary suggested that it had been written by an adult rather than a teen. Mikkelson also noted that in the decades since the book's publication, no one who knew the diarist had ever been tracked down by a reporter or otherwise spoken about or identified the diarist."}
{"text":"In hindsight, commentators have suggested various motivations for the publishers to present \"Go Ask Alice\" as the work of an anonymous deceased teenager, such as avoiding literary criticism, lending validity to an otherwise improbable story, and stimulating young readers' interest by having the book's anti-drug advice come from a teenager rather than an adult. Sparks said that while there were \"many reasons\" for publishing the book anonymously, her main reason was to make it more credible to young readers. Although the book has been classified as fiction (see Treatment of book as fiction and non-fiction), the publisher has continued to list its author as \"Anonymous\"."}
{"text":"In a 1998 \"New York Times\" book review, Mark Oppenheimer suggested that \"Go Ask Alice\" had at least one author besides Sparks. He identified Linda Glovach, an author of young-adult novels, as \"one of the 'preparers'\u2014let's call them forgers\u2014of \"Go Ask Alice\"\", although he did not give his source for this claim. \"Publishers Weekly\", in a review of Glovach's 1998 novel \"Beauty Queen\" (which told the story, in diary form, of a 19-year-old girl addicted to heroin), also stated that Glovach was \"a co-author of \"Go Ask Alice\"\"."}
{"text":"Treatment of book as fiction and non-fiction."}
{"text":"Following Sparks' statements that she had added fictional elements to \"Go Ask Alice\", the book was classified by its publishers as fiction (and remains so classified as of 2016) and a disclaimer was added to the copyright page: \"This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\""}
{"text":"Despite the classification and the disclaimer, \"Go Ask Alice\" has frequently been taught as non-fiction in schools and sold as non-fiction in bookstores. The publishers also continued to suggest that the book was true by including the \"Editors' Note\" stating that the book was based on an actual diary, and listing the author as \"Anonymous\", with no mention of Sparks. As of 2011, a UK paperback edition published and marketed by Arrow Books contained the statement \"This Is Alice's True Story\" on the front cover."}
{"text":"\"Go Ask Alice\" has been a frequent target of censorship challenges due to its inclusion of profanity and references to runaways, drugs, sex and rape. Alleen Pace Nilsen wrote that in 1973, \"Go Ask Alice\" was \"\"the\" book that teens wanted to read and that adults wanted to censor\" and that the censors \"felt the book did more to glorify sex and drugs than to frighten kids away from them.\" Challenges began in the early 1970s following the initial publication of the book, and continued at a high rate through the ensuing decades."}
{"text":"Some challenges resulted in the removal of the book from libraries, or in parental permission being required for a student to check the book out of a library. According to \"The New York Times\", in the 1970s it became common practice for school libraries to keep \"Go Ask Alice\" off library shelves and make it available to students only upon request, a practice which was criticized as being a form of censorship. A 1982 survey of school librarians across the United States, co-sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English, found that \"Go Ask Alice\" was the most frequently censored book in high school libraries."}
{"text":"Decades after its original publication, \"Go Ask Alice\" became one of the most challenged books of the 1990s and 2000s. On the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s, \"Go Ask Alice\" was ranked at number 25; on the ALA list compiled for the 2000s, it rose to position 18."}
{"text":"The likely authoring of the book by one or more adults rather than by an unnamed teenage girl has not been an issue in censorship disputes. Nilsen and others have criticized this on the basis that the dishonesty of presenting a probable fake memoir to young readers as real should raise greater concerns than the content."}
{"text":"The ABC television network broadcast a made-for-television movie, \"Go Ask Alice\", based on the book. It starred Jamie Smith-Jackson, William Shatner, Ruth Roman, Wendell Burton, Julie Adams, and Andy Griffith. Also among the cast were Robert Carradine, Mackenzie Phillips, and Charles Martin Smith. The film was promoted as an anti-drug film based on a true story."}
{"text":"The film was first aired as the \"ABC Movie of the Week\" on January 24, 1973. It was subsequently rebroadcast on October 24, 1973 and the network also made screening copies available to school, church and civic groups upon request. The film drew generally good reviews (with one critic calling it \"the finest anti-drug drama ever presented by TV\"), but was also criticized for lacking the complexity of the book and for not offering any solutions to the problem of teen drug addiction. The adaptation by Ellen Violett was nominated for an Emmy Award."}
{"text":"In 1976, a stage play version of the book, adapted by Frank Shiras, was published by The Dramatic Publishing Company. The play has been produced by various high school and community theatre groups."}
{"text":"Stand-up comedian Paul F. Tompkins' 2009 comedy album \"Freak Wharf\" contains a track titled \"Go Ask Alice\" in which he derides the book as \"the phoniest of balonies\" and jokingly suggests it was authored by the writing staff of the police drama series \"Dragnet\". The album title comes from a passage in the book in which the diarist refers to a mental hospital as a \"freak wharf\"."}
{"text":"The Midnight Line is a novel by British writer Lee Child. This is the twenty-second book in the Jack Reacher series. The book was released on 7 November 2017. The plot finds Reacher once again in the Midwest, this time being thrust into an investigation involving the illegal opioid trade, the pharmaceutical companies that often turn a blind eye in the name of profits, and the people dependent on them."}
{"text":"After spending the night with a woman named Michelle Chang (from \"Make Me\"), Jack Reacher is traveling through Wisconsin when he happens to stop at a pawnshop selling an unusual item: a 2005 West Point class ring. Unwilling to accept that such a priceless thing would be willingly sold, Jack suspects it to be stolen and decides against leaving town. He questions the pawnbroker and learns that the ring was sold to him by a biker named Jimmy Rat. Reacher beats up Rat's gang and learns that the ring originally belonged to a fence named Arthur Scorpio, who runs a laundromat in Rapid City, South Dakota. Reacher leaves town, aware that Rat has already warned Scorpio of his plans."}
{"text":"In Rapid City, Reacher encounters two other people with an interest in Scorpio: Gloria Nakamura, a detective who has tried and failed for years to find incriminating evidence of Scorpio's criminal enterprise, and Terrence Bramall, a private investigator hired by Tiffany Jane Mackenzie, a woman searching for her missing twin sister Serena Rose Sanderson, who Reacher learns, through a sympathetic general at West Point, is the owner of the ring. Reacher allows himself to be picked up by Scorpio's men and then subdues them in less than three seconds. In turn, Scorpio provides him with the name of Seymour Porterfield, the man who originally gave him the ring, but secretly instructs an associate of his, Billy, to kill Reacher before he finds Seymour."}
{"text":"Reacher travels to Mule Crossing, a rural town in Wyoming, where Porterfield last lived. A local shopkeep reveals that Sy has been dead for well over a year, supposedly killed by a wild bear. Bramall runs into Reacher at Billy's house, and the two agree to partner up, at least temporarily. They search Sy's house, and find evidence that a woman was living with him. Mackenzie shows up, having grown impatient with Bramall's lack of results, and Reacher reveals his growing suspicion that both Rose and Sy were involved with the illegal opioid trade, which is subsequently confirmed by Kirk Noble, a DEA agent who asks Reacher to keep him informed if he finds Rose or Billy."}
{"text":"As Rose will likely die without a new supply of opioids, Reacher, Bramall, and Mackenzie steal what she needs from Stackley's suppliers, and Reacher cuts a deal with Noble to protect Rose from having to testify against the dealers on the DEA's behalf. Nakamura attempts to arrest Scorpio, who she realizes is the head of the operation, but he chains her to a table. Reacher then confronts Scorpio and stuffs him in a mechanical dryer, while the DEA receives sufficient information to arrest a Col. Bateman, a corrupt Marine officer who had framed Seymour (driving him to commit suicide) for trying to expose his theft of military opioid supplies for resale to Scorpio."}
{"text":"Reacher returns Rose's ring to her, and she promises to get clean before she, Bramall, and Mackenzie drive off. Reacher then hitches another ride out of South Dakota, heading towards Kansas."}
{"text":"Cherry is a 2018 debut novel by American author Nico Walker. It concerns an unnamed narrator's time in college, as a soldier during the War in Iraq, and life as a drug addict and bank robber after returning from the war during the midst of the American opioid epidemic. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf on August 14, 2018."}
{"text":"The book is an example of autofiction, as the author was a military veteran who struggled with drug addiction and robbed banks, but there are several differences between Walker's real-life actions and the book's contents."}
{"text":"The unnamed narrator, a young man from Cleveland, drops out of college and enlists in the United States Army as a medic during the Iraq War. Suffering from PTSD, the narrator starts self-medicating with opiates while deployed and continues once back home. His opioid use quickly becomes a devastating addiction that hurts his attempts at furthering his education and his personal relationships. After entering into a relationship with a woman who enables his opioid abuse, the narrator begins to run out of money, and decides to start robbing banks to pay for his habit."}
{"text":"Walker had been in a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, for bank robbery since 2013, and wrote the book on a typewriter over the course of several years. He was released from prison early, in October 2019."}
{"text":"Janet Hansen, a designer at Alfred Knopf, created the book cover, which features a skull originally by Swedish graphic designer Daniel Bjug\u00e5rd. Walker\u2019s literary agent dismissed an earlier version as it \"[looked] like it should be sold in Hot Topic\"."}
{"text":"The book was published to positive reviews and \"near-universal praise\" as per the review aggregator website Book Marks and Vulture.com, respectively. Book Marks reported that 54% of critics gave the book a \"rave\" review, whilst 31% of the critics expressed \"positive\" impressions, based on a sample of 13 reviews."}
{"text":"\"Cherry\" debuted at number 14 on \"The New York Times\" bestseller list."}
{"text":"The book and the film adaptation have been criticized for presenting the bank robber sympathetically, while overlooking the innocent victims of the crime, such as the Black bank teller."}
{"text":"Porno is a novel published in 2002 by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the sequel to \"Trainspotting\"."}
{"text":"The book describes the characters of \"Trainspotting\" ten years after the events of the earlier book, as their paths cross again, this time with the pornography business as the backdrop rather than heroin use (although numerous drugs, particularly cocaine are mentioned throughout). A number of characters from \"Glue\" make an appearance as well."}
{"text":"This sequel picks up ideas of the film adaptation of \"Trainspotting\". One example is the fact that \"Spud\" has received his share of the drug money, which is shown in the film, but only alluded to in the book."}
{"text":"The novel is divided into three sections, each of which comprises chapters with different narrators. Unlike \"Trainspotting\" which had more narrational diversity, \"Porno\" is reduced to just five narrators: Sick Boy, Renton, Spud, Begbie and Nikki. Another difference from the format of \"Trainspotting\" is that each character has a defined chapter heading depending on what chapter it is. For instance, Sick Boy's chapters all begin with \"Scam...\" and then a number in front of a \"#\". Renton's all begin with \"Whores of Amsterdam Pt...\" Spud's chapters are just narrative, Begbie's are in capitals, and Nikki's are quotes from the chapter, for example \"...A SIMON DAVID WILLIAMSON PRODUCTION...\"."}
{"text":"Each narrator is associated with a distinctive prose style. Renton, Sick Boy, and Nikki's chapters are written almost entirely in \"standard\" English while Begbie and Spud's chapters are in Scots. For example, in Chapter 25, Spud narrates, \"So ah'm downcast git intae the library, thinkin tae masel\" (\"So I'm downcast when I get into the library thinking to myself\"). He also repeats certain words when talking such as \"catboy\" or \"cat\", \"likes\" or \"likesay\", and \"ken?\" Begbie often swears a lot during his chapters. Sick Boy's returning grandiose nature is featured in imagined interviews with John Gibson of the \"Evening News\" and Alex McLeish."}
{"text":"Welsh picks up upon ways in which Edinburgh has changed."}
{"text":"Danny Boyle stated his wish to make a sequel to \"Trainspotting\" based on \"Porno\" which takes place nine years later. He was reportedly waiting until the original actors themselves age visibly enough to portray the same characters, ravaged by time; Boyle joked that the natural vanity of actors would make it a long wait."}
{"text":"On 10 September 2009, Robert Carlyle revealed that Boyle was \"edging closer\" to making \"Porno\". Carlyle, who played Begbie in the film, said he would \"jump through hoops of fire backwards\" for the filmmaker and would \"do \"Porno\" tomorrow for nothing.\" Ewan McGregor, who played anti-hero Renton, expressed his reluctance to do a sequel saying it would be a \"terrible shame\". Boyle and McGregor had not worked together since 1997's \"A Life Less Ordinary\", when McGregor was passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio for the lead role in Boyle's big screen adaptation of Alex Garland's novel, \"The Beach\". In 2013, McGregor noted that he was \"ready to work\" on the film with Boyle after reconciling."}
{"text":"In 2013 Boyle said that any sequel to \"Trainspotting\" would be loosely based on \"Porno\". On 6 May 2014, Welsh confirmed that he had spent a week with Boyle, Andrew Macdonald and the creative team behind \"Trainspotting\" to discuss the sequel. Welsh stated that the meeting was in order to \"explore the story and script ideas. We're not interested in doing something that will trash the legacy of \"Trainspotting\"... we want to do something that's very fresh and contemporary.\""}
{"text":"On 17 November 2014, Welsh revealed that McGregor and Boyle had resolved their differences and had held meetings about the film, saying \"I know Danny and Ewan are back in touch with each other again. There are others in the cast who\u2019ve had a rocky road, but now also reconciled. With the \"Trainspotting\" sequel the attention is going to be even more intense this time round because the first was such a great movie - and Danny\u2019s such a colossus now. We\u2019re all protective of the Trainspotting legacy and we want to make a film that adds to that legacy and doesn\u2019t take away from it.\""}
{"text":"Filming on a sequel to \"Trainspotting\" began in May 2016, with all the major cast members reprising their roles and Danny Boyle directing. It was released on 27 January 2017."}
{"text":"Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is a novel by Marguerite Young. She has described it as \"an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, errors of judgment in individual lives, the central scene of the novel being an opium addict's paradise.\""}
{"text":"The novel is one of the longest ever written."}
{"text":"Young began writing the novel in 1947, expecting it would take two years. She worked on it daily, and did not finish until 1964. Young has said that had she known it would have taken her so long she would never have started."}
{"text":"Young had been encouraged by Maxwell Perkins, when she submitted a 40-page initial manuscript for the novel, then named \"Worm in the Wheat\". Over the years, staff at Scribner's had read portions of the work-in-progress. Nevertheless, the full manuscript was something of a surprise when delivered in February 1964:"}
{"text":"The book was typeset by computer and consumed \"38 miles of computer tape\"."}
{"text":"In a 1993 interview, Young confirmed the story. During the interview, Young stated that Miss MacIntosh was the only invented character in the novel, the rest having all been based on real people. She also said that she had thought that What Cheer, Iowa was a fictional place."}
{"text":"The following brief summaries refer to the \"core\" descriptions, which are frequently questioned and contradicted. Some are inconsistent, as in dreams."}
{"text":"Minna K. Weissenbach, a rich patron of Edna St. Vincent Millay, also known as the opium lady of Hyde Park, was the inspiration for Catherine Cartwheel."}
{"text":"Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of \"Poetry\", was the inspiration for Hannah Freemount-Snowden."}
{"text":"Howard Mitcham, a deaf Greenwich Village artist and bohemian, was the inspiration for the stone-deaf man."}
{"text":"As she worked on \"The Accidental Tourist\", Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from \"Miss MacIntosh\" at random. \"Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me.\" Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation."}
{"text":"Ana\u00efs Nin, a friend and neighbor of Young, apparently the novel's first reader, wrote a review for the \"Los Angeles Times\". This review also appeared in the sixth volume of her diaries after their publication It served as an introduction to the 1979 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich paperback edition."}
{"text":"A number of writers have given the work high praise."}
{"text":"Wakeman, John (ed.) \"World Authors 1950-1970\", H. W. Wilson, New York (1975)."}
{"text":"Fuchs, Miriam (ed) \"Marguerite Young, Our Darling\" (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994)"}
{"text":"A Million Little Pieces is a book by James Frey, originally sold as a memoir and later marketed as a semi-fictional novel following accusations of literary forgery. It tells the story of a 23-year-old alcoholic and abuser of other drugs and how he copes with rehabilitation in a twelve steps-oriented treatment center. While initially promoted as a memoir, it later emerged that many of the events described in the book never happened."}
{"text":"A badly tattered James wakes up on a commercial flight to Chicago, with injuries that he has no recollection of having sustained or of how he ended up on the plane. He is met by his parents at the airport, who take him to a rehabilitation clinic. It is revealed that James is 23 years old, and has been an alcoholic for ten years, and a crack addict for three. He is also wanted by the police in three states on several charges."}
{"text":"As he checks into the rehab clinic, he is forced to quit his substance abuse, a transition that later probably saves his life, whilst also an agonizing process. As part of this, he is forced to undergo a series of painful root canals, without any anesthesia because of possible negative reactions to the drugs. He copes with the pain by squeezing tennis balls until his nails crack."}
{"text":"The book follows Frey through the painful experiences that lead up to his eventual release from the center, including his participation in the clinic's family program with his parents, despite his strong desire not to. Throughout the novel, Frey speaks of the \"Fury\" he is fighting, which he sees as the cause of his desire to drink alcohol and use other drugs. The \"Fury\" could be seen as the antagonist of the novel, because he believes that he will not be able to recover until he learns to ignore it or \"kill\" it."}
{"text":"Frey meets many interesting people in the clinic, with whom he forms relationships and who play an important role in his life both during and after his time in the clinic. These people include a mafia boss who plays a vital role in his recovery (subject of Frey's subsequent book \"My Friend Leonard\"), and a female drug addict with whom he falls in love, despite strict rules forbidding contact between men and women at the clinic. James finally recovers and never relapses."}
{"text":"A notable feature of \"Pieces\" is its lack of quotation marks to indicate direct quotes or dialogue. Instead, a new line is started each time someone speaks. The fact that the author uses this same style to indicate his internal thoughts, often interspersed between direct dialogue from himself and others, gives the book a unique and sometimes confusing writing style, purportedly reflecting the nature of his experience in the treatment center. Frey makes frequent use of this stream of consciousness writing technique, which is intended to allow the reader to better understand his version of the events. Frey's unique writing style also involves capitalizing nouns throughout the book for unclear reasons. Frey also uses heavy repetition of words throughout the text."}
{"text":"The book was released on April 15, 2003, by Doubleday Books, a division of Random House, and received mixed feedback. While some critics, such as Pat Conroy, praised the book, calling it \"the \"War and Peace\" of addiction\", others were not as impressed by the gruesome nature of the book and Frey's overall attitude that sets the tone for the book. For example, critic Julian Keeling, a recovering addict, stated that \"Frey's stylistic tactics are irritating...none of this makes the reader feel well-disposed towards him\". Also, author Heather King said that \"\"A Million Little Pieces\" rings false\"."}
{"text":"Poet and author John Dolan roundly criticized the book, saying:"}
{"text":"He was also scathing about the writing style, which he described as a \"childish impersonation of the laconic Hemingway style\", and referred to it as a \"novel\" several times."}
{"text":"In September 2005, the book was picked as an Oprah's Book Club selection, and shortly thereafter became the number one paperback non-fiction book on Amazon.com, and topped The New York Times Best Seller list for fifteen straight weeks. By January 28, 2006, it had fallen to number four on the Amazon.com list with Winfrey's following selection, \"Night\" by Elie Wiesel, taking over the top position."}
{"text":"The book garnered international attention in January 2006 after it was reported that it contained fabrications and was not, as originally represented by the author and publisher, a completely factual memoir."}
{"text":"In October 2017, it was announced that director Sam Taylor-Johnson and actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson were working on a film adaptation of the novel."}
{"text":"After a six-week investigation, \"The Smoking Gun\" published an article on January 8, 2006, called \"A Million Little Lies\". The article described fabrications in Frey's account of his drug abuse experiences, life, and criminal record. According to CNN, \"The Smoking Gun\"'s editor, William Bastone, said \"the probe was prompted after the Oprah show aired\". He further stated, \"We initially set off to just find a mug shot of him... It basically set off a chain of events that started with us having a difficult time finding a booking photo of this guy\"."}
{"text":"The Minneapolis \"Star Tribune\" had questioned James Frey's claims as early as 2003. Frey responded at that time by saying, \"I've never denied I've altered small details.\""}
{"text":"Stories surfaced about Random House, publisher of \"A Million Little Pieces\", deciding to give full refunds to anyone who had purchased the book directly through it. According to a Gawker.com report, customers could have a claim to money if they truly felt deceived by Frey."}
{"text":"David Carr of \"The New York Times\" wrote, \"Both Mr. Frey and Ms. Talese were snapped in two like dry winter twigs.\" \"Oprah annihilates Frey\", proclaimed Larry King. \"The New York Times\" columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, \"It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into swiftboating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying\", and \"The Washington Post\"'s Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation that he crowned Winfrey \"Mensch of the Year\"."}
{"text":"All of Winfrey's reactions, as well as video clips of her interview with Frey, are found within her book club's website."}
{"text":"In Frey's note to readers, which will be included in future editions of the book, he apologized for fabricating portions of his book and for having made himself seem \"tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am.\" He added,"}
{"text":"Frey admitted that he had literary reasons for his fabrications, as well:"}
{"text":"Nevertheless, he defended the right of memoirists to draw upon their memories, not simply upon documented facts, in creating their memoirs. Additionally, Frey has discussed the controversy and stated his side of the argument on his blog."}
{"text":"Shortly after Frey's return to the Oprah Winfrey show, the Brooklyn Public Library went as far as recataloging Frey's book as fiction, although it appears most other libraries have not followed suit. The New York Times Best Seller list still includes it on the Paperback Nonfiction List as of September 2006."}
{"text":"Regardless of this controversy, the book has been published in twenty-nine languages worldwide and has sold over 5 million copies. The majority of these sales occurred after Oprah announced it as the new Oprah's Book Club book."}
{"text":"On January 18, 2006, Marty Angelo, prison minister and author of the book \"Once Life Matters: A New Beginning\", came to the defense of James Frey in a press release. While Angelo did not condone the inclusion of fictional elements in a book marketed as non-fiction, he stated, \"The controversy surrounding the recent accusations that Frey embellished some of his statements in his book is relatively minor compared to the fact this man claims he cleared one of the biggest hurdles in his life\u2014his substance abuse. That's the bottom line issue.\""}
{"text":"\"Right now the media seems to be negatively attacking the messenger instead of concentrating on promoting the positive message of redemption...\" Angelo added. \"In terms of the benefit to readers as a self-help book, the message is the key issue, not the minor story details. One needs to stay focused on what the real message is\u2014overcoming addiction.\""}
{"text":"A film version directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson premiered in 2018, with general release in 2019, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson starring."}
{"text":"The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer is a 1990 spin-off novel from the television series \"Twin Peaks\" by Jennifer Lynch. Lynch, then aged 22, is the daughter of series co-creator David Lynch. It was published between the airing of the first and second season."}
{"text":"The novel is said to be \"As seen by Jennifer Lynch,\" and is written in a matter-of-fact tone from the point of view of Laura Palmer, a small-town teenager \u2014a \"good girl gone bad\"\u2014 who is abused and terrorized by the demonic entity BOB. Lynch says she was told by her father and Mark Frost, co-creator of the series, to \"be Laura Palmer,\" and that she \"knew Laura so well it was like automatic writing.\""}
{"text":"The book begins on Laura's 12th birthday in 1984, and steadily matures in writing style and vocabulary. It recounts standard teenage concerns of her first period, her first kiss, and her relationship with her parents, alongside experiences of sexual abuse, promiscuity, cocaine addiction, and her obsession with death. Laura's poetry foreshadows her murder."}
{"text":"Later, she starts working two jobs for local hotelier Benjamin Horne - babysitting his mentally handicapped son Johnnie and apprenticing in Horne's boutique. In her spare time, she volunteers for Meals on Wheels. She soon falls back into her drug and sex addictions, however, and starts working as a prostitute at One-Eyed Jacks. While at Horne's mansion, she meets therapist Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, who agrees to take her on as a patient. Eventually, they become lovers."}
{"text":"Her slow realisation of BOB's identity is described, although pages are 'missing' from the end of the diary (i.e. the text is lacunose), which ends with an undated entry in late 1989, leaving the reader unable to reach a firm conclusion. Lynch said that \"the careful reader will know the clues and who the killer is.\" (Laura's father Leland is revealed to be the killer in the show's second season, as well as the spinoff film \"\".)"}
{"text":"The book reached number four on \"The New York Times\" paperback fiction best seller list in October 1990, though some US book stores refused to stock it due to the graphic content. It was published in the UK by Penguin Books in November 1990. \"Entertainment Weekly\" called it \"gratifyingly faithful to the spirit of \"Peaks\".\""}
{"text":"On June 10, 2011, \"Twin Peaks\" co-creator Mark Frost announced that a new edition of the diary would be published in the fall of 2011, featuring a new foreword by himself and David Lynch."}
{"text":"An audiobook was released in May 2017. It is narrated by Sheryl Lee, who played Laura in the TV series."}
{"text":"Acidity is a dystopian, cyber novelette written by Pakistani journalist and writer, Nadeem F. Paracha. Written exclusively for the website Chowk.com in 2003, it has gone on to become a controversial cult favorite among many young Pakistanis and Indians."}
{"text":"While recovering from his addictions, Paracha spent time rearranging these notes using the cut-up method and surrealist automatism."}
{"text":"He then turned it all into a work of fiction in which a heroin addict narrates his story set in future Pakistan and India that have turned into capitalist and theistic dystopias."}
{"text":"He is a traveler who is always moving up and down both the countries looking for drugs and in the process having hallucinatory dialogues with a Pakistani cleric\/Islamic extremist (called in the book as \"The Mufti\"), a group of Hindu fundamentalists (called \"The pundits\"), a group of young neoliberals (referred to as \"the fun young people\" and the \"polite voids\"), and an aging Indian Christian (called the \"Holy Father\")."}
{"text":"There are also many other characters, but much of the story revolves around these main characters as Paracha constructs his dystopia in which capitalism and organized religion have been fused together as a new totalitarian system."}
{"text":"\"Acidity\" makes a clear comment this way on the rapid economic, political and social changes taking place in India and Pakistan, especially after the end of the Cold War."}
{"text":"Third Girl is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1966 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at eighteen shillings (18\/-) and the US edition at $4.50."}
{"text":"It features her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the recurring character Ariadne Oliver. The novel is notable for being the first in many years in which Poirot is present from beginning to end. It is uncommon in that the investigation includes discovering the first crime, which happens comparatively late in the novel."}
{"text":"Mrs Oliver learns that a woman in the apartment building had recently died by falling from her window. A week passes before she tells Poirot, who feels this is what bothers Norma. The woman was Louise Charpentier. Norma says that her father ran off with Louise Birell. Later, Mrs Oliver finds a piece of paper linking Louise Charpentier to Andrew. Mary Restarick has been ill from poison in her food. Sir Roderick engages Poirot to find documents missing from his files which encounter brings young Sonia under suspicion."}
{"text":"\"Residing at Sir Roderick's home at Long Basing:\""}
{"text":"Unusually for this period, \"The Guardian\" did not carry a review of the novel."}
{"text":"Maurice Richardson in \"The Observer\" of 13 November 1966 concluded, \"There is the usual double-take surprise solution centring round a perhaps rather artificial identity problem; but the suspense holds up all the way. Dialogue and characters are lively as flies. After this, I shan't be a bit surprised to see A.C. wearing a mini-skirt.\""}
{"text":"Robert Barnard: \"One of Christie's more embarrassing attempts to haul herself abreast of the swinging 'sixties. Mrs Oliver plays a large part, detection a small one.\""}
{"text":"The novel reintroduces Stillingfleet, a character from the short story \"The Dream\" and first published in book form in the UK in \"The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding\" in 1960, and Mr Goby, whose previous appearance had been in \"After the Funeral\" in 1953."}
{"text":"In Chapter 4, while Poirot is pretending he shares a military history with Sir Roderick, he makes reference to Colonel Race from novels such as Death on the Nile and Cards on the Table, as well as Inspector Giraud from Murder on the Links."}
{"text":"A television adaptation by Peter Flannery for the series \"Agatha Christie's Poirot\" starring David Suchet as Poirot and Zo\u00eb Wanamaker as Ariadne Oliver was filmed in April and May 2008. It aired on 28 September 2008 on ITV. The adaptation took major liberties with the novel, including the following changes:"}
{"text":"The novel was also adapted as a 2017 episode of the French television series \"Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie\"."}
{"text":"In the US a condensed version of the novel appeared in the April 1967 (Volume 128, Number 6) issue of \"Redbook\" magazine with a photographic montage by Mike Cuesta."}
{"text":"This novel has been translated to various languages other than its original English. Over 20 are listed here. This is in keeping with the author's reputation for being the most translated author."}
{"text":"Naked Lunch (sometimes The Naked Lunch) is a 1959 novel by American writer William S. Burroughs. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone."}
{"text":"The vignettes (which Burroughs called \"routines\") are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs: heroin, morphine and, while in Tangier, majoun (a strong hashish confection), as well as a German opioid with the brand name Eukodol (oxycodone), of which he wrote frequently."}
{"text":"The novel was included in \"Time\"'s \"100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005\". In 1991, David Cronenberg directed a film of the same name based on the novel and other Burroughs writings."}
{"text":"The book was originally published with the title \"The Naked Lunch\" in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition (by Grove Press) did not follow until 1962. It was titled \"Naked Lunch\" and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg's possession. The article \"the\" in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. Nonetheless \"The Naked Lunch\" remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated."}
{"text":"Burroughs states in his introduction that Jack Kerouac suggested the title. \"The title means exactly what the words say: \"naked\" lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.\""}
{"text":"Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. In 2001, a \"restored text\" edition of \"Naked Lunch\" was published with some new and previously suppressed material added."}
{"text":"\"Naked Lunch\" is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant."}
{"text":"The book begins with the adventures of William Lee (also known as \"Lee the Agent\"), who is Burroughs' alter ego in the novel. His journey starts in the U.S. where he is fleeing the police in search of his next fix. There are short chapters describing the different characters he travels with and meets along the way."}
{"text":"Eventually he gets to Mexico where he is assigned to Dr. Benway; for what, he is not told. Benway appears and he tells about his previous doings in Annexia as a \"Total Demoralizator.\" The story then moves to a state called Freeland, a form of limbo, where we learn of Islam Inc. Here, some new characters are introduced, such as Clem, Carl, and Joselito."}
{"text":"A short section then jumps in space and time to a marketplace. The Black Meat is sold here and compared to \"junk\", i.e. heroin. The action then moves back to the hospital where Benway is fully revealed as a manipulative sadist."}
{"text":"Time and space again shift the narrative to a location known as Interzone. Hassan, one of the notable characters of the book and \"a notorious liquefactionist\", is throwing a violent orgy. AJ crashes the party and wreaks havoc, decapitating people and imitating a pirate. Hassan is enraged and tells AJ never to return, calling him a \"factualist bitch,\" a term which is enlarged much later when the apparently \"clashing\" political factions within Interzone are described. These include the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Factualists, and the Divisionists (who occupy \"a midway position\"). A short descriptive section tells of Interzone University, where a professor and his students are ridiculed; the book moves on to an orgy that AJ throws."}
{"text":"The book then shifts back to the market place and a description of the totalitarian government of Annexia. Characters including the County Clerk, Benway, Dr. Berger, Clem and Jody are sketched through heavy dialogue and their own sub-stories."}
{"text":"After the description of the four parties of Interzone, we are told more stories about AJ. After briefly describing Interzone, the novel breaks into sub-stories and heavily cut-up influenced passages."}
{"text":"In a sudden return to what seems to be Lee's reality, two police officers, Hauser and O'Brien, catch up with Lee, who kills both of them. Lee then goes out to a street phone booth and calls the Narcotics Squad, saying he wants to speak to O'Brien. A Lieutenant Gonzales on the other end of the line claims there's no one in their records called O'Brien. When Lee asks for Hauser instead, the reply is identical; Lee hangs up, and goes on the run once again. The book then becomes increasingly disjointed and impressionistic, and finally simply stops."}
{"text":"\"Naked Lunch\" is considered Burroughs' seminal work. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of obscene language (something Burroughs recognized and intended), the book was banned in Boston and Los Angeles in the United States, and several European publishers were harassed. It was one of the more recent American books over which an obscenity trial has been held."}
{"text":"The book was banned in Boston in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder and acts of pedophilia), making it among the last works to be banned in that city, but that decision was reversed in 1966 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The Appeals Court found the book did not violate obscenity statutes, as it was found to have some social value. The hearing included testimony in support of the work by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer."}
{"text":"On a more specific level, \"Naked Lunch\" also protests the death penalty. In Burroughs's \"Deposition: A Testimony Concerning A Sickness\", \"The Blue Movies\" (appearing in the vignette \"A.J.'s Annual Party\") is deemed \"a tract against capital punishment.\""}
{"text":"Fans of Beat Generation literature, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their band Steely Dan after a \"revolutionary\" steam-powered dildo mentioned in the novel."}
{"text":"From the 1960s, numerous film-makers considered adapting \"Naked Lunch\" for the screen. Antony Balch, who worked with Burroughs on a number of short film projects in 1960s, considered making a musical with Mick Jagger in the lead role, but the project fell through when relationships soured between Balch and Jagger. Burroughs himself adapted his book for the never-made film; after Jagger dropped out, Dennis Hopper was considered for the lead role, and at one point game-show producer Chuck Barris was considered a possible financier of the project."}
{"text":"In May 1991, rather than attempting a straight adaptation, Canadian director David Cronenberg took a few elements from the book and combined them with elements of Burroughs' life, creating a hybrid film about the writing of the book rather than the book itself. Peter Weller starred as William Lee, the pseudonym Burroughs used when he wrote \"Junkie\"."}
{"text":"Italian comics artist Gianluca Lerici, better known under his artistic pseudonym Professor Bad Trip, adapted the novel into a graphic novel titled \"Il Pasto Nudo\" (1992), published by Shake Edizioni."}
{"text":"Fiddle City is a novel by Julian Barnes writing under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh. It is the second of a four-novel series featuring Duffy, a bisexual private detective with a 'phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware'. Originally published by Jonathan Cape in 1981, it was republished by Orion books in 2014."}
{"text":"Heathrow Airport has the nickname of Fiddle City, but for Roy Kendrick who runs a transport business out of the airport, petty thievery has got out of hand as a number of shipments have gone astray and he employs Duffy to investigate. Conveniently McKay, one of Kendrick's employees has recently had a near-fatal car crash on the M4 and Duffy steps into his shoes and works undercover in Kendrick's warehouse. Duffy feels himself being watched by Mrs Boseley the dour HR manager as he uncovers evidence of cocaine smuggling."}
{"text":"David Montrose found the novel less impressive than \"Duffy\", though interesting in some ways. Richard Brown praised the way in which \"Fiddle City\" provides 'vivid low-life detail'."}
{"text":"N\u043eva (1968) is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal (the novel is one of the precursors to cyberpunk), yet making major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating to both the Grail Quest and Jason's \"Argonautica\" for the golden fleece. \"Nova\" was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969. In 1984, David Pringle listed it as one of the written since 1949."}
{"text":"After Delany completed \"Nova\" at the age of 25, his published output stopped for several years, although his writing continued. Delany completed the first draft of \"Tides of Lust\" (author's title, \"Equinox\") in September 1968 (it appeared in 1973). He first completed \"Hogg\" in June 1969 (though the novel itself would not appear until 1995). With the publication of his next major novel, \"Dhalgren\" (1975), however, his style had moved on in experimental directions notably different from that of his earlier work."}
{"text":"By the year 3172, political power in the galaxy is split between two factions: the older Earth-based Draco and the historically younger Pleiades Federation. Both have interests in the even newer Outer Colonies, where mines produce trace amounts of the prized power source Illyrion, the superheavy material essential to starship travel and terraforming planets."}
{"text":"Caught in a feud between aristocratic and economically powerful families, a scarred and obsessed captain from the Pleiades, Lorq Von Ray, recruits a disparate crew of misfits to aid him in the race with his arch-enemy, Prince Red from Draco's Red Shift Ltd., to gain economic leadership by securing a vastly greater amount of Illyrion directly from the heart of a stellar nova. In doing so, Von Ray will shift the balance of power of the existing galactic order, which will bring about the downfall of the Red family as well as end Earth's dominance over interstellar politics."}
{"text":"As the title indicates, the central metaphor for the novel is a nova: the destructive implosion\/explosion of an entire sun, which, paradoxically, while it destroys most of a solar system, also creates new elements. In the book, at the eruption of a nova, not only do the laws of physics break down, but so do the laws of politics and psychology. This idea permeates the entire plot and storyline."}
{"text":"The characters follow a quest plot line, in which they visit several worlds to gain information necessary to achieve their goal, all the while pursued by the Red family."}
{"text":"Although the novel does not indulge the literary experimentation found in Delany's later books, it maintains a high level of innovation. Some chapters end or begin in mid-sentence. Also, the point of view regularly shifts between Lorq, Katin, and the Mouse. Each page in the book carries a header that gives the year and location of the scene on the page itself (e.g., \"Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162\"). This is useful because of the flashbacks in the long journey around the galaxy."}
{"text":"Algis Budrys, describing Delany as \"the best science-fiction writer in the world,\" praised \"Nova\" as \"highly entertaining to read\" and commended Delany's integration of his sociopolitical extrapolation into his story, his accomplished characterization, and his \"virtuosity\" in presenting the novel's \"classically posed scientific puzzle.\""}
{"text":"The book's third chapter (of seven) is basically a long flashback that shows Lorq and Prince's childhoods and the political background against which the story takes place. Lorq first meets Prince and Ruby when they are all youngsters, during an attempt by their parents to end the feud between the families. The meeting ends, however, in disaster and embarrassment, and the fundamentally cruel natures of both Prince and his father Aaron\u2014as well as the senior Von Ray's innate love of violence\u2014become clear."}
{"text":"Nova has a number of character motifs in common with Delany's later literary and literary-pornographic works: the Mouse, a damaged artist who wears one shoe as does the Kid in the later \"Dhalgren\"; Katin, an intellectual and writer who attempts to record the events around him; the twins Lynceos and Idas, one black, the other albino; and Dan, a barefoot derelict, with a rope holding up his pants."}
{"text":"The novel, storyline, and themes of \"Nova\" are multilayered and complex, and lend themselves to numerous interpretations. As the critic Judith Merrill wrote at the book's publication:"}
{"text":"\"Nova\" takes place in a standard space opera setting with many of the features and tropes peculiar to the genre. Conscientiously the novel emulates many earlier and popular science fiction works."}
{"text":"Delany makes an offhand reference to Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (a random planet is named \"Trantor\"). Additionally, in one scene, a character has a false tooth with poison hidden in it, a classical trope from many espionage stories, which Frank Herbert's \"Dune\" had employed three years before. (Unlike in \"Dune\", in \"Nova\" it doesn't work.)"}
{"text":"There is also a strong similarity in names between the scientist, Ashton Clark, who, in \"Nova\", has invented the cyborg plugs and sockets centuries before, which pervade the novel, and the name of the fantasy and science fiction writer from the 'thirties and 'forties, Clark Ashton Smith."}
{"text":"Prince's ability to squeeze sand into glass and quartz fragments strongly parallels the power of many action heroes (most notably Superman), and the idea of aristocratic families feuding in space is found in numerous other space opera novels. The character of Katin is partially written to resemble the classic \"bore\" in science fiction literature\u2014a character who constantly gives lectures and explanations to describe the universe of the book. In \"Nova\", however, Katin is constantly ridiculed for filling this role and on occasion is used for comic relief."}
{"text":"In keeping with this sort of game-playing, in a scene that takes place in a vast museum, the Alkane, in the city of Phoenix on the planet Vorpis, at one point Lorq and Katin hurry through the \"FitzGerald Salon,\" clearly based on the actual \"Rubens Salon\" in the Louvre Museum in Paris\u2014after the \"Mona Lisa\" and the \"Raft of the Medusa,\" probably the Louvre's most impressive holdings."}
{"text":"Within the future society, reading the Tarot is considered both scientific and accurate. The Mouse is actually ridiculed as old-fashioned and uneducated for his skepticism about such things."}
{"text":"Much of the story revolves around a tarot reading Ty\u00ff gives Lorq at the beginning of the second mission, in which she rather successfully predicts the stakes and outcome. For example, \"The Tower\" appears, indicating that a powerful family (presumably the Reds or Von Rays) will fall, and the large number of pentacles indicates wealth. Prince and Ruby are represented by the \"King of Swords\" and the \"Queen of Swords\", respectively. An anomaly in the reading, however, occurs when Ty\u00ff drops \"The Sun\"\u2014which Lorq considered to represent a nova\u2014and the Mouse pockets it, thus making it impossible for Ty\u00ff's reading to include this card."}
{"text":"Smaller Tarot readings dot the rest of the novel. As a young child, Lorq receives a reading indicating a death in his family: within a month, his Uncle Morgan is assassinated. Likewise, Lorq's Aunt Cyana (Morgan's widow) has Lorq choose a single Tarot card for insight: it is \"The Hanged Man\", reversed, indicating that Lorq will succeed in his quest, but at a very high price."}
{"text":"Delany makes it clear that the Tarot should not be used for outright prediction. As Katin tells the highly skeptical Mouse: \"[T]he cards don't actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations[.]\" (\"Nova\", 112). \"[Tarot cards] only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than guide and suggest.\" (\"Nova\", 113) But, as the plot develops, sometimes it's difficult to distinguish clearly between useful \"guiding\" and abusive (superstitious) \"directing.\""}
{"text":"The story of scarred Captain Von Ray's obsessive quest for a nova with his crew of outcasts recalls Melville's tale of wounded Captain Ahab's search for the white whale in \"Moby-Dick\". (In a 1971 article about the current state of Science Fiction, \"Time Magazine\" writer R. Z. Shepherd wrote, \"[\"Nova\"] suggests \"Moby-Dick\" at a strobe-light show.\") In \"Nova\", the events are interpreted by Katin as a quest for the Holy Grail, with Illyrion playing the part of the Grail itself. As in the Grail story, there is a failed attempt to gain it, and someone must make a major self-sacrifice (in \"Nova\", his sanity and senses) in order to succeed."}
{"text":"Katin is constantly trying to find a plot for his novel, and finally decides to use Lorq's adventures with Prince and Ruby\u2014immediately noticing the correspondences with the Grail archetype. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that \"Nova\" is the book Katin will eventually write."}
{"text":"Although the novel takes place in the 32nd century, the society within it is described as highly stagnant, even taking into account the spread of interstellar travel and cyborging. Often, however, the book suggests that those minor characters who repeatedly make this judgment are simply looking for symptoms of change and vitality in the wrong parts of society\u2014a theme \"Nova\" shares with Alfred Bester's \"The Stars My Destination\"."}
{"text":"Cyana Von Ray Morgan, who is Lorq's aunt and a curator at humanity's largest museum, remarks that one-fourth of the displays at her museum are devoted to the Twentieth century, much the way major museums in Europe and the United States for the last hundred or so years might seem\u2014to some\u2014to have devoted a disproportionate amount of their space to Greek and Roman artifacts. She justifies this by saying that, despite all the progress made by mankind, the Twentieth Century encompasses the greatest change in humanity's fundamental situation: \"At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds.\" (\"Nova\", 156)"}
{"text":"In short, within the fictional future of \"Nova\", humanity began to colonize space by the end of the Twentieth Century. A few centuries later, and cyborg implants were invented. The combination of increasingly cheap Illyrion (the fuel of starships) and universally adaptable implants has created, by the time of the novel, a highly mobile and transient work force and population."}
{"text":"This mobile population has a drawback, however. In a pseudo-intellectual argument raised throughout the novel, characters make reference to a \"lack of cultural solidarity\" (a concept that vaguely resembles the idea of cultural capital). Because the population is constantly on the move, there is no shared culture, nor have there been any successful attempts to create new broad-based artistic and cultural movements since the end of the Twentieth Century."}
{"text":"Characters make frequent references to 20th century culture: at Prince's party in Paris (which takes place in the year 3162), a group of entertainers start performing a song by The Mamas & the Papas. Katin makes an offhand remark that indicates the board game Monopoly (which was invented during the early 20th century) is still in existence, and has even been adapted to the future society. When he needs to name a \"Renaissance Man,\" Katin mentions Bertrand Russell, despite the passage of more than a millennium since Russell died."}
{"text":"In Cyana Morgan's museum, in addition to the predominance of Twentieth Century-based exhibits, within a hall of paintings, Katin notices that many of the works share the same subjects\u2014and, in many cases, the same names\u2014even though the tags clearly indicate the paintings were created centuries apart, and on different planets. The most famous art collection in the museum is actually a forgery of an existing set of works, and the forgeries are considered more popular and valuable than the originals."}
{"text":"When the Mouse's approach gets out of control, as the novel dramatizes in one climactic sequence, the instruments of art become murderous weapons. When Katin's approach gets out of hand, the result is paralysis and silence."}
{"text":"The novel refers repeatedly to a historic \"Vega Republic,\" presumably among the worlds circling the star Vega, which flourished several centuries prior to the novel's beginning. At one point, apparently, the Republic staged an uprising and attempted to declare both political and cultural autonomy from Earth. During those years the Vegans created a new and different style in furniture, fabrics, and architecture. Many of their artists, musicians, and writers produced highly distinctive work that, in later years, caught the imagination of intellectuals in both Draco and the Pleiades. Before \"Nova\" begins, however, the Vega Republic uprising was violently suppressed, and Katin claims that the ability to identify remnants of Vegan culture has become nothing but an intellectual \"parlor game.\""}
{"text":"As the quest continues, soon Lorq drops the rationalizations for the Red\/Von Ray vendetta, except for the fact that his actions, for better or worse, will produce a major cultural shift in humanity, even though nobody can tell what that change will be, or if it will be a positive or negative one."}
{"text":"The story's main character, Lorq, is Afropean. His father is of Norwegian descent, and his Earth-born mother is Senegalese."}
{"text":"The residents of the Pleiades Federation (and the Outer Colonies) overall are an extremely mixed racial population. In addition to appearances, characters from the Pleiades sometimes have names that indicate a mixed racial heritage. For example, one of Lorq's childhood friends is named \u201cYorgos Satsumi,\u201d which contains a clearly Japanese last name, but a first name that is decidedly Greek."}
{"text":"This is in sharp contrast to the Earth-centered Draco society, where the leaders tend to be uniformly Caucasian. Individuals from Earth also tend to have extremely \"WASPish\" names. For example, a character named \"Brian\" is eventually revealed (at least, in the 2002 edition) to have the full name \"Brian Anthony Sanders.\" Moreover, according to the Mouse, Earth still has problems with racism: he recalls seeing Gypsies lynched when he was younger."}
{"text":"Ironically, although this racial diversity is considered one of the novel's most innovative features, at the time of its first publication (1968), the inclusion of minority characters proved to be a liability due to the racism ingrained in American culture at the time (see \"Publishing Status\" below)."}
{"text":"The society of \"Nova\" is in a pre-revolutionary state. Economic tensions have created a feud between the \"new money\" Von Ray family and the \"old money\" Red family, both of whom have a large stake in intergalactic transportation. Shortly before the novel's events (within the lifetime of Lorq's father), the Pleiades region achieved political autonomy from Earth\/Draco, and is now an independent federation. At the time of the novel, citizens of the Outer Colonies are beginning to support the idea of independence as well."}
{"text":"In a passage in Chapter Three, the elder Von Ray interprets the tensions in terms of social class, with each major galactic region representing one of the three traditional social classes:"}
{"text":"One thing all characters have in common is their cyborging. Individuals who cannot or will not accept these implants are effectively removed from society. The Mouse, for instance, mentions that his people (the Gypsies) refused the implants and, as a result, were treated with intolerance and even killed on Earth."}
{"text":"Prince's anger over his artificial arm, while irrational on the surface, is eventually hypothesized to have been caused by its effect on his ability to cyborg. Generally, a person has a total of five implants, two of which are located in the wrists. Since Prince was born with only one arm, he cannot fully connect himself with a machine."}
{"text":"Although the society seems on the edge of a revolution (or some other unspecified major change), the future of the novel is optimistic. As Katin reveals in one of his expository monologues, the problem of labor alienation has been overcome through the use of technology: practically all humans have cyborg socket implants that allow them to interface directly with the machines they use. These sockets are highly adaptable. Characters plug them into everything from small vacuum cleaners to the navigational systems of starships. By directly interfacing with the machines, workers are able to identify with their work, and the result is greater psychological wellbeing and less labor alienation."}
{"text":"\"Nova\" was written prior to Delany's turn to sexuality as a major focus of his work. Nevertheless, the novel suggests several sexual subtexts. In the same way that a homoerotic current informs the relationship Melville describes between Captain Ahab and the cabin boy Pip in \"Moby-Dick\", a similar undercurrent vibrates through the scenes between Captain Von Ray and the Mouse."}
{"text":"Throughout the novel, the intelligent and beautiful Ruby remains both loyal and subservient to her brother, Prince, even to the extent of going against her own feelings. Their relationship strongly suggests an incestuous nature. Prince refuses to allow her to interact with Lorq. In turn, Ruby maintains a close emotional attachment to Prince, one that, in a suggestive scene near the novel's end, proves disastrous."}
{"text":"In \"Nova\", a culturally iconic political assassination has taken place. The advanced technology at the time allowed millions of people throughout the universe to experience the sensations and emotions of the victim (Secretary Morgan, the leader of the Pleiades Federation) as he died\u2014and, directly afterwards, the emotions of his widow (and Lorq Von Ray's aunt), Cyana Von Ray Morgan. The murder was brutal: Morgan was publicly garroted at his second inauguration, and almost decapitated. Although the assassination was eventually revealed to be the work of a single man, (\"Underwood\"), for a period of time afterwards, many popular conspiracy theories were developed. To deal with her grief\u2014and that of Pleiades citizens\u2014Cyana Morgan adopted an extremely stoic posture and slowly retreated from the public eye."}
{"text":"This death is clearly a dramatic rewriting of the November 1963 \"televised\" assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, which had taken place only five years before \"Nova\" was published. Cyana Von Ray Morgan, the widow, strongly resembles Kennedy's wife Jacqueline Bauvier Kennedy in her responses, her appearance, and her interest in art."}
{"text":"Lorq, Prince, and Ruby\u2014all heirs of wealthy clans who grew up in luxury\u2014live what Lorq refers to as \"meaningless\" lives, indulging in sex, expensive hobbies (e.g. space-yacht racing), and partying. Lorq's transformation begins when, in a physical fight, Prince scars Lorq's face deeply with his artificial hand. Later in the novel, both Lorq and the Mouse attack Prince and Ruby, causing them great pain. As the novel nears completion, Ruby remarks that, prior to that event, neither she nor her brother had a true concept of what pain was really like; neither of them truly fathomed the importance of their actions and the feud until they were personally hit by it."}
{"text":"Practically all the socially powerful characters have violent natures, which often they try to hide or repress. Despite the elder Von Rays' attempts to end the feud, make peace with Aaron Red, and have their children become friends, the Von Rays cannot escape the fact that the family wealth and status were based on piracy and murder. Although outwardly Aaron Red appears harmless (he is described as bald, portly, and easily embarrassed) and he seems to be friends with members of the Von Ray family, events can bring out his natural violence and reveal him as an abusively indulgent father."}
{"text":"The novel hints at these buried emotions, when, for example, the Von Ray and Red families meet in the Outer Colonies at a reconciliatory reception. Seven-year-old Prince uses his artificial arm and its strength to kill Lorq's mother's pet bird in front of Lorq and Ruby. Later that night, the adults leave to watch the future equivalent of a cock fight, but with winged reptiles rather than roosters. The novel's violence gathers force in an unexpected eruption from Prince against Lorq at his party in Paris; much of the novel tries to explain the origins of this rage."}
{"text":"Both rage and pain are eventually recognized by the mature characters to have been a necessary component of their lives. Lorq realizes that, without Prince's attack to 'wake him up,' he would have gone on with a carefree life; he maintains his scar as a reminder of this. The successful completion of Lorq's quest has an extremely painful outcome for Lorq personally. As well, now that the need for Illyrion mines is gone, we know, the Outer Colonies will collapse socially and economically. The Red heirs fought for the status quo; only near the end of the novel do they experience the pain that goes along with the realization of what Lorq is trying to do."}
{"text":"\"Nova\" is considered one of the major forerunners of the cyberpunk movement. It prefigures, for instance, cyberpunk's staple trope of human interfacing with computers via implants."}
{"text":"While the New Wave of science fiction was concentrating on near-future science fiction stories and the highly subjective exploration of \"inner space,\" in 1968, the year it was published, \"Nova\" seemed a deliberate throw-back to traditional space opera\u2014and space opera at its grandest and most operatic."}
{"text":"While reviews in the American professional science fiction magazines, \"The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction\" and \"Galaxy\", by Judith Merril and Algis Budrys, respectively, were highly praiseful, the review in the New Wave outlet, England's \"New Worlds\", by M. John Harrison, while acknowledging the skill and energy with which it had been written, called the book a \"waste of time and talent.\""}
{"text":"Writer William Gibson claimed to be greatly influenced by Delany, and his novel \"Neuromancer\" includes allusions to \"Nova.\" While Delany's vision of the future is optimistic, however, the cyberpunk movement has a distinctly dystopic outlook. Gibson's novel includes a character, Peter Riviera, introduced (like the Mouse) in Istanbul, with the same holographic projection powers (although via implants) as the Mouse in \"Nova\"; but Gibson's character is a psychopath. Likewise, Gibson includes a character who awkwardly wears only one shoe; this character (Ashpool) is an insane killer."}
{"text":"Several episodes of \"Futurama\" feature the \"holophoner,\" a musical instrument that is very difficult to play, and projects holographic imagery to accompany the music."}
{"text":"Despite its status, reputation, and influence on science-fiction as a genre, for a dozen years after 1990 (the date of Bantam Books' final 14th printing), \"Nova\" was out of print. Hardcover copies were highly prized. Not until 2002 did Vintage Books rerelease it."}
{"text":"Over the years before \"Nova\" appeared, Delany had already won the Nebula Award twice for best science fiction novel of the year: \"Babel-17\" had gained the award in 1967 (in a tie for best novel of 1966 with Daniel Keyes's \"Flowers for Algernon\", a.k.a. \"Charly\"). \"The Einstein Intersection\" won him the award the following year in 1968 (for best novel of 1967)."}
{"text":"While awaiting publication by Doubleday, \"Nova\" was submitted to \"Analog\" editor John W. Campbell for potential serialization. Campbell rejected the novel, saying in a telephone conversation with Delany's agent that, though he'd enjoyed the book, he did not feel his magazine's readership \"would be able to relate to a black main character.\""}
{"text":"The Vintage edition of the novel corrects some minor mistakes in the original version. It also adds an entire passage that does not appear in any of the older published versions."}
{"text":"In the Vintage edition, Delany includes a passage in which Prince Red brags about how he is responsible for the death of Brian, a character who disappears, in earlier editions, after a single chapter. In the Vintage edition, toward the end of the book Prince describes how, using his wealth and power, and with no more provocation than a careless comment Brian once made about Prince's arm, Prince systematically destroyed Brian's life, until Brian became homeless and died of exposure. Prince claims that he has killed some two dozen others in a similar manner for similar reasons."}
{"text":"This passage significantly alters Prince's characterization. In earlier editions, the worst that could be said of Prince is that he had been \"spoiled\" and had a violent temper. The new material turns him into a remorseless murderer and adds a moral component to Lorq's quest absent in the earlier versions. If Prince defeats Lorq, the most powerful man in the galaxy will be a psychopathic killer."}
{"text":"The above passage is in the original typescript of \"Nova\", however. It is also in Delany's handwritten version of the novel in his notebooks from 1967. Both are in the Delany Holdings on store in the Howard Gottlieb Archives at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. Initially the writer omitted it before publication of the first edition, when a friend who had read the manuscript found that section too extreme. In later years Delany decided to return it to the novel, because he felt readers needed to know what happened to Brian, after he seems to vanish from the book."}
{"text":"Additionally, in the first edition of \"Nova\" it is unclear whether or not Lorq's parents are still alive by the time the novel ends: When Lorq begins his quest, his mother is already dying of a degenerative disorder, but at the end he makes no mention of them, nor does he try to contact them. However, in another (much briefer) passage added in the Vintage Books edition, related to the above, Lorq has a memory that implies both of his parents and Aaron Red (as did Dan and Brian) died during the past ten years. This is in neither the original typescript nor in the notebook version, and is a true addition."}
{"text":"A Scanner Darkly is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published in 1977. The semi-autobiographical story is set in a dystopian Orange County, California, in the then-future of June 1994, and includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use (both recreational and abusive). The novel is one of Dick's best-known works and served as the basis for a 2006 film of the same name, directed by Richard Linklater."}
{"text":"The protagonist is Bob Arctor, member of a household of drug users, who is also living a double life as an undercover police agent assigned to spy on Arctor's household. Arctor shields his identity from those in the drug subculture and from the police. (The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book.) While posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to \"Substance D\" (also referred to as \"Slow Death\", \"Death\" or \"D\"), a powerful psychoactive drug. A conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer, through whom he intends to identify high-level dealers of Substance D."}
{"text":"Donna takes Arctor to \"New-Path\", a rehabilitation clinic, just as Arctor begins to experience the symptoms of Substance D withdrawal. It is revealed that Donna has been a narcotics agent all along, working as part of a police operation to infiltrate New-Path and determine its funding source. Without his knowledge, Arctor has been selected to penetrate the organization. As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed \"Bruce\" and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games, intended to break the will of the patients."}
{"text":"The story ends with Bruce working at a New-Path farming commune, where he is suffering from a serious neurocognitive deficit, after withdrawing from Substance D. Although considered by his handlers to be nothing more than a walking shell of a man, \"Bruce\" manages to spot rows of blue flowers growing hidden among rows of corn and realizes that the blue flowers are \"Mors ontologica\", the source of Substance D. The book ends with Bruce hiding a flower in his shoe to give to his \"friends\"\u2014undercover police agents posing as recovering addicts at the Los Angeles New-Path facility\u2014on Thanksgiving."}
{"text":"\"A Scanner Darkly\" is a fictionalized account of real events, based on Dick's experiences in the 1970s drug culture. Dick said in an interview, \"Everything in \"A Scanner Darkly\" I actually saw.\""}
{"text":"Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid-1972, Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenage drug users at his home in Marin County, described in a letter as being located at 707 Hacienda Way, Santa Venetia. Dick explained, \"[M]y wife Nancy left me in 1970 ... I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. She left me with a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house and nobody living in it but me. So I just filled it with street people and I got mixed up with a lot of people who were into drugs.\""}
{"text":"During this period, the author ceased writing completely and became fully dependent upon amphetamines, which he had been using intermittently for many years. \"I did take amphetamines for years in order to be able to\u2014I was able to produce 68 final pages of copy a day,\" Dick said."}
{"text":"The character of Donna was inspired by an older teenager who became associated with Dick sometime in 1970; though they never became lovers, the woman was his principal female companion until early 1972, when Dick left for Canada to deliver a speech to a Vancouver science fiction convention. This speech, \"The Android and the Human\", served as the basis for many of the recurring themes and motifs in the ensuing novel. Another turning point in this timeframe for Dick is the alleged burglary of his home and theft of his papers."}
{"text":"After delivering \"The Android and the Human\", Dick became a participant in X-Kalay (a Canadian Synanon-type recovery program), effortlessly convincing program caseworkers that he was nursing a heroin addiction to do so. Dick's recovery program participation was portrayed in the posthumously released book \"The Dark Haired Girl\" (a collection of letters and journals from this period, most of a romantic nature). It was at X-Kalay, while doing publicity for the facility, that he devised the notion of rehab centers being used to secretly harvest drugs (thus inspiring the book's New-Path clinics)."}
{"text":"In the afterword Dick dedicates the book to those of his friends\u2014he includes himself\u2014who suffered debilitation or death as a result of their drug use. Mirroring the epilogue are the involuntary goodbyes that occur throughout the story\u2014the constant turnover and burn-out of young people that lived with Dick during those years. In the afterword, he states that the novel is about \"some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did\", and that \"drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to move out in front of a moving car\"."}
{"text":"There was also the challenge of transmuting the events into \"science fiction\", as Dick felt that he could not sell a mainstream or literary novel after several previous failures. Providing invaluable aid in this field was Judy-Lynn del Rey, head of Ballantine Books' SF division, which had optioned the book. Del Rey suggested the timeline change to 1994 and emphasized the more futuristic elements of the novel, such as the \"scramble suit\" employed by Fred (which, incidentally, emerged from one of the mystical experiences). Yet much of the dialogue spoken by the characters used hippie slang, dating the events of the novel to their \"true\" time-frame of 1970\u201372."}
{"text":"Upon its publication in 1977, \"A Scanner Darkly\" was hailed by ALA Booklist as \"his best yet!\" Brian Aldiss lauded it as \"the best book of the year\", while Robert Silverberg praised the novel as \"a masterpiece of sorts, full of demonic intensity\", but concluded that \"it happens also not to be a very successful novel... a failure, but a stunning failure\". Spider Robinson panned the novel as \"sometimes fascinating, sometimes hilarious, [but] usually deadly boring\". Sales were typical for the SF genre in America, but hardcover editions were issued in Europe, where all of Dick's works were warmly received."}
{"text":"It was nominated for neither the Nebula nor the Hugo Award but was awarded the British version (the BSFA) in 1978 and the French equivalent (Graouilly d'Or) upon its publication there in 1979. It also was nominated for the Campbell Award in 1978 and placed sixth in the annual Locus poll."}
{"text":"The title of the novel refers to the Biblical phrase \"Through a glass, darkly\", from the King James Version of 1 Corinthians 13. Passages from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play \"Faust\" are also referred to throughout the novel. The same-titled film by Ingmar Bergman has also been cited as a reference for the book, the film depicting the similar descent into madness and schizophrenia of its lead character portrayed by Harriet Andersson."}
{"text":"The rotoscoped film \"A Scanner Darkly\" was authorized by Dick's estate. It was released in July 2006 and stars Keanu Reeves as Fred\/Bob Arctor and Winona Ryder as Donna. Rory Cochrane, Robert Downey, Jr., and Woody Harrelson co-star as Arctor's drugged-out housemates and friends. The film was directed by Richard Linklater."}
{"text":"An unabridged audiobook version, read by Paul Giamatti, was released in 2006 by Random House Audio to coincide with the release of the film adaptation. It runs approximately 9.5 hours over eight compact discs. This version is a tie-in, using the film's poster as cover art."}
{"text":"Inexcusable is a 2005 novel written by Chris Lynch in the young adult genre. Through first-person narration, it chronicles the life of high school senior Keir Sarafian. A sequel, \"Irreversible\", was published on September 6, 2016."}
{"text":"As the novel unfolds, Keir becomes more unpopular because of his substance abuse, school behavior, and his infamous tackle on the football field giving him the nickname \"Killer.\" Keir's self-image dissipates after he accidentally paralyzes an opponent, participates in bullying classmates, and then tries cocaine. First, he leans on Gigi because she listens to him and doesn't judge him. Once he learns about Gigi and her new boyfriend, he is angry and leans on his two sisters, Fran and Mary. Keir's older sisters have mixed feelings about his behavior. He leans on Fran the most because she sees the \"good\" in Keir despite his terrible actions."}
{"text":"One night close to graduation, after a night of partying and substance abuse, Gigi decides to accompany Keir on a visit to Fran's college and they end up in her dorm room alone. In addition to all of this, Gigi tells Keir that her boyfriend could not go to the dance and she needed him to come with her to the dance. When they were both in that cabin there were two beds and when Keir saw how beautiful Gigi looked he went to her bed and something inexcusable happened. Then, the setting reverts to the opening with the two arguing about what happened while they were sleeping next to each other."}
{"text":"Drug of Choice is a novel written by Michael Crichton, as his eighth published novel, and the sixth to feature his pseudonym John Lange. It was originally published in 1970. Hard Case Crime republished the novel under Crichton's name in November 2013."}
{"text":"Film rights were optioned in 1970 by the actor Robert Forster and his agent David de Silva, to produce a film starring Forster called \"High Synch\". John Neufeld was hired to write a screenplay. \"Unlike the book, our script will not have a happy ending\", said Forster. \"We think the movie ought to serve as a warning.\" However, the film was never made."}
{"text":"Mala onda () is a Chilean Bildungsroman novel and social commentary by Alberto Fuguet. It is also Fuguet's debut novel, first published in 1991."}
{"text":"\"Mala onda\" is set in Chile during a ten-day period in September, 1980, around the time of the Chilean constitutional referendum. The protagonist is Mat\u00edas Vicu\u00f1a, a maladjusted, upper class, 17-year-old boy who is jaded and frustrated by what he perceives as the folly and blandness of his family and peers. Mat\u00edas lives a loveless, meaningless life, and indulges in sex, drugs, alcohol, and rock music."}
{"text":"The novel examines the Chilean emulation of American consumerism and pop culture, in the context of a growing opposition to the dictatorial rule of Augusto Pinochet in Chile."}
{"text":"The novel takes place in 1980 in Santiago, Chile during the political referendum of the country's future with Pinochet. The protagonist visits Rio, Brazil briefly in the beginning of the novel. He also goes to Re\u00f1aca, a resort in the region on Valparaiso. Other than these, the main location is the urban setting of Santiago. The neighborhoods mentioned in the novel within Santiago include Providencia, \u00d1u\u00f1oa, and Las Condes."}
{"text":"Mat\u00edas finds comfort in J.D. Salinger's \"The Catcher in the Rye\", relating to Holden Caulfield's cynicism and teenage angst. The novel culminates with Mat\u00edas attempting to replicate Holden's self-inflicted isolation by fleeing his family, friends, and academics. He even purchases a red hunting hat to complete the persona. Ultimately, however, Mat\u00edas is reunited with his father. Despite familial bouleversements, Mat\u00edas finds peace and learns to embrace change: symbolizing the trepidation Chile faces as it undergoes a transition of power."}
{"text":"The Coffee Trader is a historical novel by David Liss, set in 17th-century Amsterdam. The story revolves around the activities of commodity trader Miguel Lienzo, who is a Jewish refugee from the Portuguese Inquisition. Recovering from near financial ruin, he embarks on a coffee trading scheme with a Dutch woman, kept secret because it is forbidden by his community council. Miguel navigates the social structures of the Amsterdam business world, the politics of the council, and the plots of competitors bringing this new import to Europe."}
{"text":"The character of Miguel Lienzo is the great-uncle of Benjamin Weaver, the protagonist of Liss's first novel, \"A Conspiracy of Paper\". This novel is set about 60 years earlier, but is not a prequel; as stated by Liss, Miguel Lienzo is a very different kind of character from the English great-nephew whom he would never meet."}
{"text":"The book has been published in translation into Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish."}
{"text":"Several intrigues follow. Miguel finds a mutual attraction with his sister-in-law Hannah. Parido catches wind of Miguel's interest in coffee, and appears to have coffee interests of his own. Parido uses his influence with the Jewish ruling council, the Ma'amad, to censure Miguel. Miguel receives threats from creditors still waiting to be paid, even as he is himself waiting to be paid for his profits in the whale oil trade. He begins to have suspicions about Geertruid's trustworthiness and takes some of her coffee-investment money to pay some of his creditors. Miguel and Daniel's relationship is strained by many of these events."}
{"text":"When Nunes's coffee shipment arrives in Amsterdam, it appears that Nunes has promised it to both Parido and Miguel Lienzo. Parido and Lienzo place a wager on the final price of coffee for the day and both attempt to manipulate the price in their favor. Miguel wins the wager and a considerable sum, but betrays Geertruid in the process, believing Geertruid to having been Parido's spy. He repays her initial investment but cuts her out of the profits she was expecting."}
{"text":"Hannah deceives Daniel by informing him that their baby is actually Miguel's and, along with his bankruptcy, he informs her he is leaving the city and will grant her a divorce. She goes to Miguel's house and they plan to marry. Miguel learns that Geertruid was working for Alferonda, not Parido; he tries too late to make amends. Geertruid leaves the city with her companion, Hendrick, but not before Hendrick beats Miguel's sometime-friend Joachim in retribution for Miguel's betrayal. Miguel and Hannah have a son, Samuel, and later another boy. His prosperous future now lies securely in the coffee trade."}
{"text":"\"The Coffee Trader\" was published in 2003 to generally positive reviews. Several reviewers noted the novel's depth of historical detail, including mention of the three pages of bibliography at the end of the book. Others mention the intricacy of the plot; writing for \"The New York Times\", Thomas Mallon described \"the book's commercial plot to be as complicated as it is expert\", requiring occasional narrative recaps to help the reader keep track of its intricacies. Despite the \"careful attention\" to setting, Mallon wished for a bit more \"time and place\" as a break from the rapid and intricate plot."}
{"text":"Writing in the \"Jewish Quarterly Review\", Adam Sutcliffe identified \"The Coffee Trader\" as among \"the underinvestigated emerging genre of the 'port Jew novel,'\" citing as other examples \"In an Antique Land\" by Amitav Ghosh, \"The Nature of Blood\" by Caryl Phillips, and \"The Moor\u2019s Last Sigh\" by Salman Rushdie."}
{"text":"Thompson wrote that he concluded their March trip by spending some 36 hours alone in a hotel room \"feverishly writing in my notebook\" about his experiences. These writings became the genesis of \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.\""}
{"text":"What originally was a 250-word photo caption assignment for \"Sports Illustrated\" grew to a novel-length feature story for \"Rolling Stone\"; Thompson said publisher Jann Wenner had \"liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively scheduled it for publication\u2014which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it.\" He had first submitted a 2,500-word manuscript to \"Sports Illustrated\" that was \"aggressively rejected.\""}
{"text":"Weeks later, Thompson and Acosta returned to Las Vegas to report for \"Rolling Stone\" on the National District Attorneys Association's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs being held from April 25\u201329, 1971, and to add material to the larger \"Fear and Loathing\" narrative. Besides attending the attorneys' conference, Thompson and Acosta looked for ways in Vegas to explore the theme of the American Dream, which was the basis for the novel's second half, to which Thompson referred at the time as \"Vegas II\"."}
{"text":"On April 29, 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time while completing \"Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,\" the article chronicling the death of Salazar. Thompson joined the array of Vegas experiences within what he called \"an essentially fictional framework\" that described a singular free-wheeling trip to Vegas peppered with creative licenses."}
{"text":"In November 1971, \"Rolling Stone\" published the combined texts of the trips as \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream\" as a two-part story, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, who two years before had worked with Thompson on an article titled \"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved\". Random House published the hardcover edition in July 1972, with additional illustrations by Steadman; \"The New York Times\" said it is \"by far the best book yet on the decade of dope,\" with Tom Wolfe describing it as a \"scorching epochal sensation.\""}
{"text":"The basic synopsis revolves around journalist Raoul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson) and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo (Oscar Zeta Acosta), as they arrive in Las Vegas in 1971 to report on the Mint 400 motorcycle race for an unnamed magazine. However, this job is repeatedly obstructed by their constant use of a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD, ether, cocaine, alcohol, mescaline, and cannabis. This leads to a series of bizarre hallucinogenic experiences, during which they destroy hotel rooms, wreck cars, and have visions of anthropomorphic desert animals, all the while ruminating on the decline of both the \"American Dream\" and the '60s counterculture in a city of greed."}
{"text":"The \"wave speech\" is an important passage at the end of the eighth chapter that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end. Thompson often cited this passage during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel."}
{"text":"\"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\" is Thompson's most famous work, and is known as \"Fear and Loathing\" for short; however, he later used the phrase \"Fear and Loathing\" in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles."}
{"text":"Moreover, \"Fear and Loathing\", as a phrase, has been used by many writers, the first (possibly) being Friedrich Nietzsche in \"The Antichrist\". In a \"Rolling Stone\" magazine interview, Thompson said: \"It came out of my own sense of fear, and [is] a perfect description of that situation to me, however, I have been accused of stealing it from Nietzsche or Kafka or something. It seemed like a natural thing.\""}
{"text":"He first used the phrase in a letter to a friend written after the Kennedy assassination, describing how he felt about whoever had shot President John F. Kennedy. In \"The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved\", he used the phrase to describe how people regarded Ralph Steadman upon seeing his caricatures of them."}
{"text":"Jann Wenner claims that the title came from Thomas Wolfe's \"The Web and the Rock\"."}
{"text":"Another possible influence is \"Fear and Trembling\", a philosophical work by existentialist S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard published in 1843. The title is a reference to a line from a Bible verse, Philippians 2:12."}
{"text":"When it was published in fall of 1971, many critics did not like the novel's loose plot and the scenes of drug use; however, some reviewers predicted that \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\" would become an important piece of American literature."}
{"text":"In \"The New York Times\", Christopher Lehmann-Haupt told readers to not \"even bother\" trying to understand the novel, and that \"what goes on in these pages make[s] Lenny Bruce seem angelic\"; instead, he acknowledged that the novel's true importance is in Thompson's literary method: \"The whole book boils down to a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's \"An American Dream\" left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out\"."}
{"text":"Cormac McCarthy has called the book \"a classic of our time\" and one of the few great modern novels."}
{"text":"In the book \"The Great Shark Hunt\", Thompson refers to \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\" as \"a failed experiment in the gonzo journalism\" he practiced, which was based on William Faulkner's idea that \"the best fiction is far more \"true\" than any kind of journalism\u2014and the best journalists have always known this\". Thompson's style blended the techniques of fictional story-telling and journalism."}
{"text":"He called it a failed experiment because he originally intended to record every detail of the Las Vegas trip as it happened, and then publish the raw, unedited notes; however, he revised it during the spring and summer of 1971. For example, the novel describes Duke attending the motorcycle race and the narcotics convention in a few days' time; the actual events occurred a month apart. Later, he wrote, \"I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight\/crazy journalism\"."}
{"text":"Nevertheless, critics call \"Fear and Loathing\" Thompson's crowning achievement in gonzo journalism. For example, journalist and author Mikal Gilmore said the novel \"feels free wheeling when you read it [but] it doesn't feel accidental. The writing is right there, on the page\u2014startling, unprecedented and brilliantly crafted\"."}
{"text":"The original version of the novel was published in \"Rolling Stone\" magazine under the byline \"Raoul Duke\". The book was published with Thompson's name as the author."}
{"text":"In chapter 8 of part I, Thompson tells a story about his neighbor, \"a former acid guru who later claimed to have made that long jump from chemical frenzy to preternatural consciousness\". In the \"Rolling Stone\" article the neighbor was identified as \"Dr. Robert De Ropp on Sonoma Mountain Road\". In the book version, the name and the street were redacted \"at insistence of publisher's lawyer\"."}
{"text":"In chapter 12 of part 2, Thompson tells of a belligerent drunk confronting Bruce Innes, of Canadian folk band The Original Caste, at a club in Aspen. The drunk was identified in the \"Rolling Stone\" version as \"Wally Schirra, the Astronaut\". In the book version he is only identified as \"a former Astronaut\" and his name is, again, redacted \"at insistence of publisher's lawyer\"."}
{"text":"British artist Ralph Steadman added his unique and grotesque illustrations to the \"Rolling Stone\" issues and to the novel. Steadman had first met Thompson when \"Scanlan's Monthly\" hired Steadman to do the illustrations for Thompson's first venture into gonzo journalism called \"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.\""}
{"text":"Many critics have hailed Steadman's illustrations as another main character of the novel and companion to Thompson's disjointed narrative. \"The New York Times\" noted that \"Steadman's drawings were stark and crazed and captured Thompson's sensibility, his notion that below the plastic American surface lurked something chaotic and violent. The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen as monsters.\""}
{"text":"Steadman has expressed regret at selling the illustrations, at the advice of his agent, to \"Rolling Stone\" founder Jann Wenner for the sum of $75, which remained in Wenner's possession until he sold them in 2016. As a result of that transaction Steadman has largely refused to sell any of his original artwork and has been quoted as saying \"If anyone owns a Steadman original, it's stolen.\" While there are original pieces held outside his archive, they are exceedingly rare. The artist has kept possession of the vast bulk of his artwork."}
{"text":"An audiobook version was released by Margaritaville Records and Island Records in 1996, on the 25th anniversary of the book's original publication. It features the voice talents of Harry Dean Stanton as the narrator\/an older Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Jarmusch as Raoul Duke, and Maury Chaykin as Dr. Gonzo, with Jimmy Buffett, Joan Cusack, Buck Henry and Harry Shearer in minor roles. Sound effects, period-appropriate music and album-like sound mixing are used extensively to give it the surreal feeling characteristic of the book. Quotes from Thompson himself bookend the album."}
{"text":"The album is presumably out-of-print, due to its relative rarity, but is sought after by fans for its high production values and faithfulness to the book's tone. Excerpts of it were included in the Criterion Collection release of the movie."}
{"text":"The novel's popularity gave rise to attempted cinematic adaptations; directors Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone each unsuccessfully attempted to film a version of the novel. In the course of these attempts, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were considered for the roles of Duke and Dr. Gonzo but the production stalled and the actors aged beyond the characters. Afterwards, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered, but Belushi's death ended that plan. Art Linson's 1980 film \"Where the Buffalo Roam\" starring Bill Murray and Peter Boyle is based on a number of Thompson's stories, including \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\"."}
{"text":"In 1989, \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\" was almost made by director Terry Gilliam when he was given a script by illustrator Ralph Steadman. Gilliam, however, felt that the script \"didn't capture the story properly\". In 1995, Gilliam received a different script he felt worth realising; his 1998 film features Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo respectively. However, criticism was mixed and the film was a box office failure."}
{"text":"A graphic novel adaptation of \"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas\", adapted by Canadian artist Troy Little, was released in October 2015. In interviews, Little said \"We decided right off the bat not to go the Steadman route, or be too influenced by the movie either, and draw Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. So we wanted to make it its own unique thing... For me, capturing the manic energy and spirit of the book, and staying true to the feel of \"Fear and Loathing\" was my big goal.\""}
{"text":"\"Fear and Loathing on the Planet of Kitson,\" an episode of the ABC\/Marvel Studios superhero series \"Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.\", first broadcast on May 24, 2019, not only takes its title from the novel, it also incorporates plot elements from the novel and 1998 film, particularly around characters having to navigate a casino (in this case a casino on an alien planet) while under the influence of a psychedelic drug."}
{"text":"The 2013 album Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! by Panic! at the Disco (originally from Las Vegas) was named after a line from the book."}
{"text":"The music videos for Lil Wayne's \"No Worries\" and The Weeknd's song \"Heartless\" draw heavy inspiration from the 1998 film."}
{"text":"Japanese electronicore band Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas is named after the book and film."}
{"text":"My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. Moshfegh's second novel, it is set in New York City in 2000 and 2001 and follows an unnamed protagonist as she gradually escalates her use of prescription medications in an attempt to sleep for an entire year."}
{"text":"\"My Year of Rest and Relaxation\" is Ottessa Moshfegh's second novel, following \"Eileen\" (2015, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), as well as a novella (\"McGlue\", 2014) and a short story collection (\"Homesick for Another World\", 2017). Moshfegh initially planned \"My Year of Rest and Relaxation\" to be focused primarily on the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, even reaching out to terrorism expert Paul Bremer, though she called off the interview and the project took a different tack."}
{"text":"Of her experience writing the novel, Moshfegh said:"}
{"text":"I feel like the book was successful in that I graduated out of a lot of those concerns by writing the book. When I wrote the book, my passion and anger were located much more outwardly and so the tone of the narrator, who I think a very angry person, is not something I relate to anymore."}
{"text":"\"My Year of Rest and Relaxation\" was published on July 10, 2018, by Penguin Press."}
{"text":"Told in the present tense (while the narrator includes some memories of her past, she recounts them as thoughts occurring to her in the present rather than as flashbacks), the novel is \"tuned to a hyper-contemporary frequency,\" Tolentino wrote, with the narrator's indifference to real-life events highlighting the way her plan for self-improvement by tuning out the world contrasts with \"the oft-preached mandates of authenticity or engagement\". (At the same time, Tolentino suggests, \"There is something in this liberatory solipsism that feels akin to what is commonly peddled today as wellness.\")"}
{"text":"According to literary review aggregator Literary Hub, the novel received very positive reviews. In \"Slate\", Laura Miller praised the novel, saying, \"Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable.\" The \"Publisher's Weekly\" review found the book \"captivating and disquieting...showcas[ing] Moshfegh's signature mix of provocation and dark humor.\" Several reviews, including Miller and \"Publishers Weekly\", felt \"the novel drags a bit in the middle\", though the ending was widely praised, with Miller saying Moshfegh \"found a more satisfying way to resolve the plot\" in \"My Year of Rest and Relaxation\" than in her first novel, \"Eileen\"."}
{"text":"Reviewing the novel in \"The New Yorker\", Jia Tolentino wrote, \"Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.\" In \"The New York Times\", Dwight Garner was more hesitant in his praise, but ultimately concluded: \"Moshfegh writes with so much misanthropic aplomb, however, that she is always a deep pleasure to read. She has a sleepless eye and dispenses observations as if from a toxic eyedropper.\""}
{"text":"Les Chemins de Katmandou (\"the roads to Kathmandu\") is a 1969 novel by the French writer Ren\u00e9 Barjavel. It tells the story of a man who joins a group of hippies who live and travel in Nepal, where they take drugs and practice free love in the belief that it will free them from materialism, only to meet disappointment."}
{"text":"The novel was the adaptation of the 1969 film \"The Pleasure Pit\", directed by Andr\u00e9 Cayatte and starring Renaud Verley and Jane Birkin. The film had 1,635,664 admissions in French cinemas."}
{"text":"Bongwater is a 1995 American debut novel by Michael Hornburg. Utilizing two different narrative perspectives, it follows a drug dealer and his counterculture friends in Portland, Oregon, as well as his tempestuous ex-girlfriend who has fled to New York City after the dissolution of their short-lived relationship."}
{"text":"The novel was adapted into a 1998 film of the same name starring Luke Wilson, Alicia Witt, and Brittany Murphy."}
{"text":"The novel shifts from first-person narration by David, a marijuana dealer and aspiring filmmaker in Portland, Oregon, to third-person narration by Courtney, his ex-girlfriend who has left Portland and is living in the East Village in New York City, where she has moved into a squat. Prior to leaving, she had caught David's house on fire and left it to burn down."}
{"text":"After Courtney leaves, David moves in with their mutual friends, Robert and Tony, a gay couple, and begins dating Mary, a stripper, but still reminisces of Courtney. David and Mary go to visit David's childhood friend Phil, who grows marijuana in the mountains, while in New York, Courtney's friend Jennifer comes to visit and they attend a party in Brooklyn."}
{"text":"The novel was based in part on Hornburg's own experiences living in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s, where he was attending Portland State University. The novel's female character, Courtney, was inspired by Courtney Love, whom Hornburg purportedly had a relationship with."}
{"text":"\"Alternative Press\" called the novel \"one of coolest books of the year. Hornburg explodes the whole grunge mythos by taking it out of the realm of the flash photo spread and giving us the seamy, unimaginative days upon days of fear and hopelessness.\" Karen Karbo in reviewing the book, wrote: \"No one writing today walks the line between glamour and pathos better than Michael Hornburg. Being young and lost in America has never looked so good, or so terrifying. \"Bongwater\" is at once gorgeous, witty, and sad.\""}
{"text":"In their review of the novel, \"The Seattle Weekly\" said: \"There is no grunge bodice-ripper [in the novel]; it sticks close to the theory that life is never simple and people always suck. \"Bongwater\" is written from first-hand experience, simple prose touched with just enough witty embroidery to seize the imagination. The music is peripheral, the real sound a silent scream.\""}
{"text":"Leslie Holdcroft of \"The Seattle Times\", however, gave the novel a negative review, writing: \"Hornburg brings us the struggling-artists' guide to Portland, including cheap sex, drugs, strippers, drag queens, an accidental house fire and air that \"smells like worms.\" Hornburg's version of Manhattan's East Village looks even worse: Take all those bad things, add violence and concrete...The end result is like a bad tourist guide: plenty of street addresses, building names, and insider's tips, but little reason to stay and explore.\""}
{"text":"Vurt is a 1993 science fiction novel written by British author Jeff Noon. The debut novel for both Noon and small publishing house Ringpull, it went on to win the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was later listed in \"The Best Novels of the Nineties\"."}
{"text":"\"Vurt\" tells the story of Scribble and his \"gang\", the Stash Riders, as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester, England, in which society has been shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug\/shared alternate reality, accessed by sucking on colour-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become \"real\"."}
{"text":"Before the novel begins, Scribble and his sister take a shared trip into a vurt called English Voodoo, but upon awakening Scribble finds his sister has disappeared. Out of that trip comes an amorphous semi-sentient blob which Mandy, a fellow Stash Rider, nicknames \"The Thing from Outer Space\". From that point on, Scribble is on a mission to find a rare and contraband Curious Yellow feather so that he might find his sister."}
{"text":"\"Vurt\" achieved both critical and commercial success, attracting praise from the science fiction community as well as the literary arena. It has been stylistically compared to William Gibson's cyberpunk novel \"Neuromancer\", as well as Anthony Burgess's \"A Clockwork Orange\"."}
{"text":"In \"High Anxieties\", a book exploring the modern concept of addiction, Scribble is used as an example of a character who has traded addiction for a chance at transcendence. Brodie \"et al.\" liken Scribble's incorporation of Vurt technology into his biological body as a metaphor for the revelation potentially gained through drug use. They point out that the exchange rate between the real and the Vurt is tempered by Hobart's Constant, or \"H\"\u2014which is \"not incidentally\", Brodie argues, \"slang for heroin.\""}
{"text":"The book has attracted criticism due to its implausible science and \"wild and kaleidoscopic\" yet unsatisfying plot. \"Entertainment Weekly\" felt \"Vurt\" was undeserving of receiving the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award, saying the book's \"sentimental incest and adolescent self-congratulation ... is never really startling or disturbing.\""}
{"text":"Jeff Noon says \"Vurt\" originally began as an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's \"The Torture Garden\", an anti-authoritarian novel written at the turn of the 20th century. Noon, recently exposed to virtual reality technology by the magazine Mondo 2000, depicts the torture garden as a virtual world. Noon also credits Joseph Campbell's book \"The Hero with a Thousand Faces\" for inspiring the narrative structure of \"Vurt\"."}
{"text":"The character of Desdemona is based on the character of the same name from William Shakespeare's play \"Othello\"."}
{"text":"The Curious Yellow feather is a possible allusion to the 1967 Swedish film \"I Am Curious (Yellow)\", which uses non-linear narrative structures and postmodern techniques like the novel. It might also be a reference to computer worms (the Vurt is riddled with virtual reality serpents which propagate from game to game, like computer worms replicate themselves by hijacking computer programs)."}
{"text":"\"Vurt\" has been described as a retelling of Orpheus' visit to the Underworld. Orpheus and Scribble are both poets and musicians, and each attempts to rescue their idealised lovers from an alternate reality. As Joan Gordon points out, cyberspace represents \"the underside of the human condition\" and therefore the journey to virtual reality is comparable to the mythic journey to commune with the dead. In addition, the myth of Orpheus, like \"Vurt\", explores what it means to be human in relation to the non-human; Orpheus encountered the dead, and Scribble the virtual simulations created by computers."}
{"text":"There are multiple allusions to stories by Lewis Carroll, such as a club the main character walks into, referred to as the Slithy Tove, which is a quote from Carroll's poem, the Jabberwocky."}
{"text":"There have been a few comic adaptations of the novel, most notably \"Vurt \u2013 The Comic Remix\", with art by Lee O'Connor."}
{"text":"In August 2015, Ravendesk Games conducted a Kickstarter campaign, successfully funding a tabletop role-playing game version of \"Vurt\". The campaign reached its goal in only ten days, suggesting an ongoing public awareness and cult-like fondness for the novel. Featuring all-new material by Jeff Noon himself, the RPG was officially released in October 2017 to critical praise."}
{"text":"Although Noon began the screenplay for the film version of \"Vurt\" in 2002, with Iain Softley scheduled to direct, in 2005 he stated on his public website that \"Of the Vurt film, all has gone silent at the moment. Don't hold your breath.\""}
{"text":"In 2000, Liam Steel directed \"Vurt: The Theatre Remix\", which ran for three weeks at Contact Theatre in Manchester."}
{"text":"In 2013, 20th anniversary edition of the novel was published, featuring three new stories and a foreword by Lauren Beukes."}
{"text":"The Rules of Attraction is a satirical black comedy novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1987. The novel follows a handful of rowdy and often sexually promiscuous, spoiled bohemian students at a liberal arts college in 1980s New Hampshire, including three who develop a love triangle. The novel is written in first person narrative, and the story is told from the points of view of various characters."}
{"text":"The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2002. Ellis himself has remarked that among film adaptations of his books, \"The Rules of Attraction\" came closest to capturing his sensibility and recreating the world of his novels."}
{"text":"The novel is written in the first-person, continuing the aesthetic of Ellis' earlier \"Less Than Zero\", and is told from the points of view of multiple characters. The main narrators are three students: Paul, Sean, and Lauren. A number of other characters also provide first-hand accounts throughout the story, which takes place at the fictional Camden College, a liberal arts school on the East Coast of the United States. The three main characters (who rarely attend class) end up in a love triangle within a sequence of drug runs, \"Dressed to Get Screwed\" parties, and \"End of the World\" parties."}
{"text":"The story begins and ends midway through a sentence (the first word in the book being 'and', the last words are 'and she') in order to give the effect that it begins somewhere closer to the middle, rather than at a true beginning (in medias res). Another interpretation is that the story has neither a beginning nor an ending, signifying the endless cycle of debauchery in which the characters of the novel engage. This is sometimes mistaken by readers as a typographical error or the result of a missing page, but was purposely written by Ellis. The novel ends in a similar fashion, with the last sentence cut off before its end."}
{"text":"Sean is a twenty-one-year-old student from a wealthy family. He is very promiscuous and a heavy substance abuser, as well as a drug dealer in the employ of Rupert Guest. He becomes romantically involved with Lauren, a relationship he considers to be true love. It is also implied that Sean is bisexual, as he apparently becomes involved in a sexual relationship with Paul Denton. However, whether these encounters are real or simply a product of Paul's imagination is left ambiguous; Paul narrates sexual incidents between himself and Sean, while such incidents are absent from Sean's own narration."}
{"text":"Lauren is a painter and poet who has sexual relations with several boys on campus, all the while pining for Victor, her boyfriend who left Camden and headed to Europe. She is often depressed and very emotional. She is in her senior year at Camden."}
{"text":"At the beginning of the novel, it is revealed that Lauren lost her virginity at a party during her freshman year at Camden, where she got so intoxicated that she passed out in bed with another student only to awaken and find herself being raped by a pair of townies. She becomes romantically involved with Sean Bateman halfway through the book, even though she holds Sean in contempt and considers the relationship nothing but a way to pass the time before Victor comes back from Europe. She was also in a relationship with Paul before the events of the book take place. The character reappears as a main character in \"Glamorama\", in which she becomes reacquainted with Victor after having become a successful model and actress."}
{"text":"\"The Rules of Attraction\" was adapted into a film of the same name in 2002. It was directed by Roger Avary and starred James Van Der Beek as Sean, Shannyn Sossamon as Lauren, Ian Somerhalder as Paul, and Kip Pardue as Victor."}
{"text":"The Nexus Trilogy is a postcyberpunk thriller novel trilogy written by American author Ramez Naam and published between 2012-2015. The novel series follows the protagonist Kaden Lane, a scientist who works on an experimental nano-drug, Nexus, which allows the brain to be programmed and networked, connecting human minds together. As he pursues his work, he becomes entangled in government and corporate intrigue. The story takes place in the year 2040."}
{"text":"\"Nexus\" tied for Best Novel in the 2014 Prometheus Awards given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society. It was also shortlisted for the 2014 Arthur C. Clarke award. \"Nexus\" was published in 2012. Its sequel, \"Crux\", was published in 2013. The third volume of the trilogy, \"Apex\", was published in 2014, and won the 2015 Philip K. Dick Award. The film rights to \"Nexus\" were purchased by Paramount in 2013."}
{"text":"After returning to the monastery, the ERD recon spider robots shoots a neuro toxin at Kade and Shu. Feng cuts Kades right arm off to prevent the spreading of the toxin. Shu is killed. Nexus 5 is spread around the world, despite the efforts of government forces. Warren Becker, the Enforcement Division Deputy Director at the ERD, commits suicide. Kade uses gecko genes to grow back his arm."}
{"text":"Six months after the upload of the construction plan of the Nexus, a nano drug, which allows the brain to be programmed and networked, connecting human minds together, the world faces terrorism and massive abuse of the new technology. The Liberation Front, a terror cell secretly created and headed by the US-American government, spread terror in the name of posthumanism, to prevent people from using the new technology and bring up an atmosphere of two 'n' eight to take drastic measures against Nexus."}
{"text":"In the meantime, our protagonist Kade and his new friend, clone warrior Feng, are fleeing from the CIA, which want see them both killed. On the elopement Kade is trying to stem the misuse of the nano drug to prevent a war between posthumans and humans. He has a code to the Nexus system that he can use to hack it."}
{"text":"The secret services are very interested in the code. Ilya Aleander dies as prisoner because she didn't give the code to her turnkeys. Rangan Shankari can escape."}
{"text":"Su-Yong Shu died in Nexus and now lives on as a computer intelligence and prisoner on a server belonging to the Chinese government. Ling Shu, her daughter, tries to help her mother escape. At the end of the book, the mother uses Ling Shus Nexus system to hack her brain and take over the body of her daughter."}
{"text":"In Thailand, Samantha Cataranes helps in a protectory."}
{"text":"The United States and China in particular and the Earth in general are aroused by disturbances. Unrest and riots spread with Nexus-upgraded protesters and police. Su-Yong Shu, the former dead neuroscientist who stole her daughter's body by downloading herself into it, tries to take over all electronic systems and with them the entire world, recreating it to fit her imagination. The posthumans are called Apex, the climax, and reinstatement of humankind."}
{"text":"The film rights to the novel series were purchased by Paramount in 2013."}
{"text":"The novel is heavily based in, and extends concepts in the author Ramez Naam's 2007 non-fiction work \"More Than Human: Embracing the promise of biological enhancement,\" in which the author argues for a technology like the fictional drug Nexus."}
{"text":"The genetic enhancements to boost strength, speed, and stamina, as described in \"Nexus\", are likely already possible, argued so by Ramez Naam."}
{"text":"The Nexus backdoor that is created by Kade and Rangan in the novel is based on the Karger and Schell Multics backdoor, implemented experimentally by Ken Thompson, co-inventor of the Unix operating system."}
{"text":"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965. Like many of Dick's novels, it utilizes an array of science fiction concepts, explores the ambiguous slippage between reality and unreality. It is one of Dick's first works to explore religious themes."}
{"text":"The novel takes place in a future 2016 where humankind has colonized every habitable planet and moon in the Solar System. To cope with the difficult life away from Earth, colonists rely on the illegal hallucinogen Can-D, secretly distributed by corporate head Leo Bulero. New tensions arise with the rumor that merchant explorer Palmer Eldritch has returned from an expedition in possession of a new alien hallucinogen to compete with Can-D."}
{"text":"Up to the point where the novel begins, New York City-based Perky Pat (or P.P.) Layouts, Inc., has held a monopoly on this product, as well as on the illegal trade in the drug Can-D which makes the shared hallucinations possible."}
{"text":"The novel opens shortly after Barney Mayerson, P.P. Layouts' top precog, has received a \"draft notice\" from the UN for involuntary resettlement as a colonist on Mars. Mayerson is sleeping with his assistant, Roni Fugate, but remains conflicted about the divorce, which he himself initiated, from his first wife Emily, a ceramic pot artist. Meanwhile, Emily's second husband tries to sell her pot designs to P.P. Layouts as possible accessories for the Perky Pat virtual worlds\u2014but Barney, recognizing them as Emily's, rejects them out of spite."}
{"text":"Under the guise of a reporter, Bulero travels to Eldritch's estate on the Moon, where Eldritch holds a press conference. Bulero is kidnapped and forced to take Chew-Z intravenously. He enters a psychic netherworld over which both he and Eldritch seemingly have some control. After wrangling about business with Eldritch, Bulero travels to what appears to be Earth at some time in the not-too-distant future. Evolved humans identify him as a ghost and show him a monument to himself commemorating his role in the death of Eldritch, an \"enemy of the Sol System.\""}
{"text":"Bulero returns to Earth and fires Mayerson because Mayerson was afraid to travel to the Moon to rescue him. Mayerson, in despair, accepts his UN conscription to Mars but Bulero recruits him as a double agent. Mayerson is to inject himself with a toxin after taking Chew-Z in a plot to deceive the UN into thinking Chew-Z is harmful and cause them to ban it."}
{"text":"On Mars, Mayerson buys some Chew-Z from Eldritch, who appears in holographic form. Mayerson tries to hallucinate a world where he is still with Emily but finds that he does not control his apparent hallucination. Like Bulero, he finds himself in the future. Mayerson arrives in New York two years hence where he speaks with Bulero, Fugate and his future self about the death of Palmer Eldritch."}
{"text":"The novel has an ambiguous ending, with Bulero heading back toward Earth, and apparent proliferation of Eldritch's cyborg body 'stigmata', which may mean that Bulero is still trapped in Eldritch's hallucinatory domain, or that Chew-Z is becoming increasingly popular among Terrans and Martian colonists."}
{"text":"Algis Budrys of \"Galaxy Science Fiction\" described the novel as \"an important, beautifully controlled, smoothly created book which will twist your mind if you give it the least chance to do so\". He praised Dick's accomplishment, saying \"the whole creation resonates to the touch of the only present science-fiction writer who could possibly have done it\" and characterizes the result as \"a witty, sometimes lighthearted, and always fascinating piece of fiction\". Budrys later named the book the best science-fiction novel of his first year as reviewer for the magazine, reporting that others \"are calling it some kind of half-conscious failure\"."}
{"text":"Weird fiction writer China Mieville listed this book in one of his top weird fiction books of all time, saying \"It's infuriating to have to choose just one of Dick's works - he is the outstanding figure in SF. In the end I went for Stigmata because I remember how I felt when I put it down. Hollow and beaten. I kept thinking: \"That's it. It's finished. Literature has been finished.\""}
{"text":"In a 2003 retrospective review, sci-fi and fantasy author Michael Moorcock criticized \"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch\" as thematically \"incoherent\", complaining about Dick's lack of an \"idiosyncratic structure or style\"."}
{"text":"Glamorama is a 1998 novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis. \"Glamorama\" is set in and satirizes the 1990s, specifically celebrity culture and consumerism. \"Time\" describes the novel as \"a screed against models and celebrity.\""}
{"text":"Ellis wanted to write a Stephen King-style ghost story novel, which would eventually become \"Lunar Park\"; finding it difficult at the time, he began work on the other novel which he had in mind. This was a Robert Ludlum-style thriller, with the intention of using one of his own vapid characters who lack insight as the narrator."}
{"text":"Ellis composed the book between December 1989 and December 1997."}
{"text":"The novel is a satire of modern celebrity culture; this is reflected in its premise, which features models-turned-terrorists. A character remarks, \"basically, everyone was a sociopath ... and all the girls' hair was chignoned.\" The novel plays upon the conspiracy thriller conceit of someone \"behind all the awful events\", to dramatize the revelation of a world of random horror. The lack of resolution contributes to Ellis' artistic effect. The obsession with beauty is reflected in consistent namedropping; this satirizes (the main character) Victor's obsession with looks, and perhaps is indicative of the author's own attraction to glamor."}
{"text":"\"As much as celebrity itself, our collective celebrity worship becomes the real target of Ellis' satire\", writes the \"Star Tribune\". Models in the novel act as a synecdoche of the larger culture. Reviewer Eric Hanson writes, \"Their [models'] selfishness and brutality, he implies, are simply an extreme manifestation of what consumer culture encourages in everyone.\" Victor's own pursuit of being cool or too hip \"destroys him\". A CNN reviewer gives the example of Victor not wanting to explain his impersonator, \"because the places he was seen were always hot spots he should have frequented.\""}
{"text":"In 1999, the contemporary Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero wrote a composition for chamber ensemble entitled \"Glamorama Spies\", which was inspired by the novel."}
{"text":"\"Glitterati\" is a 2004 film directed by Roger Avary assembled from the 70 hours of video footage shot for the European sequence of \"The Rules of Attraction\". It expands upon the minimally detailed and rapidly recapped story told by Victor Ward, portrayed by Kip Pardue, upon his return to the United States after having travelled extensively around Europe. In regard to expanding upon those events, the film acts as a connecting bridge between \"The Rules of Attraction\" and the upcoming film adaptation set to be directed by Avary. Avary has called \"Glitterati\" a \"pencil sketch of what will ultimately be the oil painting of \"Glamorama\".\""}
{"text":"In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of \"Glamorama\", narrated by Jonathan Davis, as part of its \"Modern Vanguard\" line of audiobooks."}
{"text":"In 2010, when a film adaptation of \"Glamorama\" was mentioned in an interview with Movieline.com, Bret Easton Ellis commented, \"I think the days of being able to make that movie are over.\" From the same interview, Ellis mentioned that an idea for a mini-series adaptation was brought forth to HBO though it was ultimately declined and further stating the movie would be left in Roger Avary's hands if one was to be made."}
{"text":"On October 13, 2011, Bret Easton Ellis reported on Twitter the following:"}
{"text":"Fans have noted similarities to the 2001 Ben Stiller comedy \"Zoolander\". Ellis stated that he is aware of the similarities, and went on to say that he considered and attempted to take legal action. Ellis was asked about the similarities in a 2005 BBC interview. In the response to the question, he said that he is unable to discuss the similarities due to an out-of-court settlement."}
{"text":"A.J. Jacobs of \"Entertainment Weekly\" did not enjoy the book's more \"meta\" conceits, and gives the novel a 'C'. Daniel Mendelsohn of the \"New York Times\" opines derisively that \"Like its predecessors, \"Glamorama\" is meant to be a withering report on the soul-destroying emptiness of late-century American consumer culture, chichi downtown division; but the only lesson you're likely to take away from it is the even more depressing classic American morality tale about how premature stardom is more of a curse than a blessing for young writers.\" The CNN reviewer concludes \"in the end, \"Glamorama\" is less than the sum of its parts\"."}
{"text":"Ellis himself has claimed that, as of 2018, the novel has failed to break even for its US publisher, Knopf."}
{"text":"Christodora is a novel by New York City\u2013based journalist Tim Murphy which was first published on August 2, 2016 by Grove Press."}
{"text":"In \"Christodora\", Tim Murphy tells the story of diverse characters living in an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora."}
{"text":"Milly and Jared, with their adopted son Mateo, live unexpected experiences with their neighbor Hector, a former AIDS activist and a current addict."}
{"text":"There are radical changes that occur in their personal lives and community: first, the 2000s hipsters rising after the 1980s junkies and protestors, then the emergence of the wealthy residents of the 2020s."}
{"text":"This time travelling novel illustrates the difficult human experiences behind AIDS and puts the destructive power of hard drugs under the spotlight."}
{"text":"Tim Murphy is a NYC-based journalist who for two decades, worked on reporting LGBT related topics (Culture, politics, movements, etc.) through his publication in several magazines such as \"POZ Magazine\" (as an editor and staff writer), \"Out\", \"The Advocate\", and \"New York Magazine\"."}
{"text":"He got nominated for GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Journalism, for his coverage on HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP"}
{"text":"He's also a contributor in The New York Times and Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler."}
{"text":"He lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley."}
{"text":"Paramount Television has optioned the novel for a limited TV series. Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias will write the adaptation, with Sachs to direct. It will be produced by Cary Fukunaga with his production company Parliament of Owls."}
{"text":"TekWar is a series of science fiction novels created by Canadian actor William Shatner and ghost-written by American writer Ron Goulart, published by Putnam in October 1989. The novels gave rise to a comic book series, video game, and later TV movies and a series, both of the latter featuring Shatner."}
{"text":"Partnered with the good-natured and charismatic Mexican Sid Gomez, the two make up a good cop\/bad cop partnership with Cardigan's past continually being brought up as a foil for his new career - most honest people he meets distrust him, and most dishonest people attempt to kill him for perceived slights in the drug trade. However, the two prove an effective team and stay a core duo throughout the series, with input from a comprehensive list of informants, employees of both Cosmos, other detective agencies and Cardigan's son Dan and his girlfriend Molly - both of whom are enrolled in the GLA police academy and as such have access through an informant to police files."}
{"text":"The 22nd century is populated with artificial intelligence such as integrated computer systems and \"andies\" which range from obvious metal robots to highly sophisticated simulacrums, some of which are accurate enough to deceive an observer into thinking they are human."}
{"text":"Each novel covers a specific case, all are Tek-related, but most include sub-plots which involve non-Tek issues and travel out of the GLA, occasionally to other countries or as far as orbiting satellites. A shadowy government agency known as OCO - the Office of Clandestine Operations - is a frequent antagonist in the novels, albeit usually keeping to the background and supporting the particular novel's villain."}
{"text":"Shatner began to write notes that would become the novels on the set of \"\", and has been quoted as saying that the original book was an attempt to blend elements from \"Star Trek\" and \"T. J. Hooker\"."}
{"text":"In 1992, Tekwar was adapted in to a comic book series."}
{"text":"A new Tekwar comic book adaptation, entitled \"Tek War Chronicles\", by Shatner and comic book writer Scott Davis with art by Erich Owen and colors by Michelle Davies, was released by Bluewater Productions on June 24, 2009. As of 2010, \"Tek War Chronicles\" is available digitally exclusively through Devil's Due Digital."}
{"text":"Trading cards with comic book artwork were published by Cardz in 1993."}
{"text":"The Tekwar novels became a television franchise with TV movies in 1994 then a series."}
{"text":"The first three were adaptations of the books, while TekJustice was an original movie."}
{"text":"Tekwar was also made into a 1995 computer game by Capstone Software using the Build engine."}
{"text":"Come Back, Little Sheba is a 1950 play by the American dramatist William Inge. The play was Inge's first, written while he was a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri."}
{"text":"Set in the Midwestern house of Lola and Doc Delaney, the plot centers on how their life is disrupted by the presence of a boarder, Marie, a college art student who has a keen interest in the young men around her."}
{"text":"Middle-aged Lola engages in mild flirtations with the milkman and the mailman. She sees in Marie a younger version of herself and encourages her pursuit of her hometown boyfriend, the wealthy Bruce, but also her classmate, the athletic Turk."}
{"text":"Doc, a chiropractor, abandoned a different career in medicine when he married a pregnant Lola, who subsequently lost the baby."}
{"text":"An alcoholic, Doc maintains a precarious sobriety. To him, Marie represents youth and opportunities long gone; seeing her with Turk brings out resentments against Lola for ruining his life. Ultimately these feelings cause him to fall off the wagon, and act violently toward Lola. Frightened, she calls Doc's AA sponsor, who comes to collect Doc and take him to the police station, where he is detained for drunkenness. Afterward, forced hospitalization sobers him up, and once the boarder leaves, he and Lola reconcile."}
{"text":"The title refers to Lola's missing dog, who disappeared before the play's opening and remains gone throughout the story. Lola hopes for the puppy's return throughout the play by calling \"Come back, little Sheba\" daily from the front door, but eventually faces reality and gives up on Sheba's return."}
{"text":"The play premiered at the Westport Country Playhouse. Presented by the Theatre Guild and directed by Daniel Mann, the first Broadway production premiered at the Booth Theatre on February 15, 1950, and ran 190 performances. The opening night cast included Shirley Booth as Lola, Sidney Blackmer as Doc, and Joan Lorring as Marie. Booth won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play and Blackmer won Best Actor."}
{"text":"Reprising her Broadway role, Booth starred opposite Burt Lancaster as Doc and Terry Moore as Marie in a 1952 film adaptation. Booth won both the 1953 Best Actress Academy award and Best Actress - Drama Golden Globe for her portrayal of Lola."}
{"text":"In 1974, Clint Ballard, Jr. and Lee Goldsmith adapted the play for the musical stage. Kaye Ballard portrayed Lola in the Chicago tryout, but the production never reached Broadway as planned. In 2001, it was revived under the title \"Come Back, Little Sheba\" at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, Connecticut with Donna McKechnie as Lola. (A recording of this production was released by Original Cast Records.)"}
{"text":"A 1977 television version starred Laurence Olivier as Doc, Joanne Woodward as Lola, and Carrie Fisher as Marie. Granada Television produced the movie as part of its \"Laurence Olivier Presents\" anthology series. In 2006, Acorn Media released the movie as part of a DVD set with six other productions from the series."}
{"text":"In 1984, the Roundabout Theatre Company mounted an Off Broadway revival, directed by Paul Weidner and starring Shirley Knight as Lola, Philip Bosco as Doc, Mia Dillon as Marie, Steven Weber as Bruce, and Kevin Conroy as Turk. In his review in \"Time\", William A. Henry III observed, \"Like all of Inge's best plays, \"Sheba\" is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere . . . Middle age is portrayed as a time of aching sexual frustration, made more acute by the close-at-hand vision of youth . . . Inge did not transform his characters: they end where they began. But he understood them. In their interplay was genuine life, often blunted but ever resilient.\""}
{"text":"In 2017, the Transport Group put up a production \"Come Back, Little Sheba\", which won the Obie Award for performance by Heather MacRae."}
{"text":"The Crack-Up (1945) is a collection of essays by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It includes previously unpublished letters and notes, along with the three essays Fitzgerald originally wrote for \"Esquire\" magazine, which were first published in 1936. After Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Edmund Wilson compiled and edited this anthology, first published by New Directions in 1945."}
{"text":"The main essay starts \"Of course all life is a process of breaking down ...\" which gives something of the tone of the piece."}
{"text":"The book also includes other essays by Fitzgerald and positive evaluations of his work by Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos, and John Peale Bishop, plus letters from Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton in 1925 praising Fitzgerald's novel \"The Great Gatsby\"."}
{"text":"At the beginning of \"The Crack-Up\" Fitzgerald makes this widely quoted general observation:\u2014"}
{"text":"As an example of this \"truth,\" he cites the ability to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. In modern decision theory, the quote has been used by some to explain the bias shown in many experiments, where subjects gather information to justify a preconceived notion. These experiments suggest that the mental ability described by Fitzgerald (being able to see both sides of an argument) is rarer than many assume."}
{"text":"The essays when originally written were poorly received and many reviewers were openly critical, particularly of the personal revelations. Time has been somewhat kinder to them and the collection is an insight into the mind of the writer during this low period in his life."}
{"text":"The philosopher Gilles Deleuze adopted the term \"crack-up\" from Fitzgerald to refer to his interpretation of the Freudian death instinct."}
{"text":"The title of the 2017 Fleet Foxes album \"Crack-Up\" was inspired by these essays."}
{"text":"\"Demon in a Bottle\" is a nine-issue story arc from the comic book series \"The Invincible Iron Man\" (vol. 1), published in issues 120 through 128 in 1979 by Marvel Comics. It was written by David Michelinie and Bob Layton and illustrated by John Romita, Jr., Bob Layton, and Carmine Infantino. \"Demon in a Bottle\" is concerned with Tony Stark's alcoholism."}
{"text":"The storyline ran in \"Iron Man\" #120-128 (March\u2013Nov. 1979), plotted by David Michelinie and Bob Layton, with script by Michelinie. John Romita, Jr. pencilled the breakdown sketches, with Layton providing finished art. Issue #122 (May 1979) was both plotted and scripted by Michelinie, penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Layton."}
{"text":"\"Demon in a Bottle\" was originally only the title of the final issue in the storyline. When the storyline was collected in trade paperback in 1984 and 1989, it was published under the title \"The Power of Iron Man\". \"Demon in a Bottle\" later became the popular name for the storyline, and collected editions were then published under that title."}
{"text":"Hammer learns of Stark's escape and orders the supervillains he keeps in his employ to find him. The supervillains find Stark, who has found the confiscated briefcase containing his spare armor and suited up. Iron Man battles and defeats the villains, then goes after Hammer. Rhodes has convinced the police of his story and the island is attacked by police helicopters. Hammer escapes, and Iron Man flies into the air and crashes down, damaging the island and causing it to sink. Stark returns home and continues binge drinking, and drunkenly yells at his butler, Edwin Jarvis. Jarvis resigns the next day."}
{"text":"\"Demon in a Bottle\" has been recognized by critics as \"the quintessential Iron Man story,\" \"one of the best super-hero sagas of the 1970s,\" and \"one which continues to influence writers of the character today.\" The storyline won a 1980 Eagle Award for \"Favorite Single Comic Book Story.\" Praising Michelinie's \"clever\" writing and Romita and Layton's \"highly distinguishable\" artwork, J. Montes of the Weekly Comic Book Review said, \"Iron Man was never known for having engaging stories, but in this one rare case it happened and that is why we treasure it.\" Montes felt it was \"a bit silly to see [Stark] recover from [the effects of his alcoholism] over the course of one issue,\" but added that \"there's no mistaking the losses and struggles he deals with.\""}
{"text":"D.K. Latta of Pulp and Dagger praised Michelinie for \"deliver[ing] smart writing and plausible, grown up characters that are a pleasure to read and a rich tapestry of plot threads\" and \"avoid[ing] the preachy, holier-than-thou route, and instead just tell[ing] a story that happens to concern a costumed super-hero getting a little...lost.\" Latta found Romita's pencil art \"problematic\" but added that \"Bob Layton's inks help a lot.\" Win Wiacek of Now Read This! said, \"The fall and rise of a hero is a classic plot, and it\u2019s seldom been better used in the graphic narrative medium and never bettered in the super-hero field. An adult and very mature tale for kids of all ages, it is an unforgettable instance of triumph and tragedy perfectly told.\""}
{"text":"Stark's alcoholism was revisited in later storylines, and remains a defining element of the character."}
{"text":"Jon Favreau, director of the 2008 \"Iron Man\" film, said: \"Stark has issues with booze. That's part of who he is.\" Favreau said that elements of the story would be used in future \"Iron Man\" sequels: \"I don't think we'll ever do the \"Leaving Las Vegas\" version, but it will be dealt with.\" In \"Iron Man 2\", Favreau notes that the scene of Tony drunkenly carousing during a party in his armor at his residence until Col. James Rhodes intervenes is the closest he intended to adapt the \"Demon in a Bottle\" storyline."}
{"text":"Collected editions include a trade paperback published in May 2006 () and a Marvel Premiere Classics hardcover in 2008 (). It was published as part of The Official Marvel Graphic Novel Collection."}
{"text":"Critics liken the personality of Harry Hole to those of the famous literary detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Jules Maigret, and Nero Wolfe. According to Jo Nesbo himself, the character is inspired by and a tribute to Michael Connelly's character Harry Bosch.The novels are frequent bestsellers."}
{"text":"Hole is a chain-smoker and heavy drinker who is introverted and prone to depression. He later stops drinking after realising he is an alcoholic. His encounters with assassins, corruption, and serial killers throughout the novels often strengthen his cynical attitude. His problematic and often unsocial behaviour, as well as his obsessive tendencies during investigations, brings him into repeated conflict with his superiors and some colleagues, many of whom dislike him while grudgingly respecting his work and abilities. M\u00f8ller often shields Hole from being fired, believing he is a brilliant detective and that the Oslo Police Department needs him. Along with standard police training, Hole undertook specialised training in interrogation techniques and firearms at the FBI."}
{"text":"Harry Hole's home address is in Sofies Gate in Bislett located in the author's own home city of Oslo. Many of the stories involve detailed background and descriptions of real locations such as the actual Oslo Police Department headquarters. Hole regularly interacts with city residents and immigrants from a variety of ethnic and social backgrounds. Many of the novels feature his favourite \"watering hole,\" Restaurant Schr\u00f8der (Schr\u00f8der's, for short) in St. Hanshaugen."}
{"text":"The seventh novel in the series, \"The Snowman\", was adapted as a film in 2017 and starred Michael Fassbender as Harry Hole, with Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ronan Vibert, Val Kilmer and J.K. Simmons."}
{"text":"The Cup of Fury is a 1956 non-fiction work by Upton Sinclair describing how alcohol affected the lives of many writers including Jack London, Ben Hecht and Hart Crane."}
{"text":"The Iceman Cometh is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939. First published in 1946, the play premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 9, 1946, directed by Eddie Dowling, where it ran for 136 performances before closing on March 15, 1947."}
{"text":"The title (\"The Iceman Cometh\") refers to a running gag between Hickey and the dead-enders about coming home after traveling his sales route to find his wife \"rolling in the hay with the iceman\" (akin to the more contemporary joke about the \"milkman\"). Ironically, he has murdered her due to his inability to accept his own infidelities. Confessing his crime, Hickey must confront the consequences, including the prospect of execution."}
{"text":"The central contention of the play is the human need for self-deceptions or \"pipe dreams\" to carry on with life: to abandon them or to see them for the lies that they are is to risk death. It is in this context that the story concludes with Larry Slade calling himself \u201cthe only real convert to death Hickey made here\u201d as a response to witnessing Parritt's suicidal leap from the roof. Having stopped lying to himself and come to terms with his real motivation behind informing on his mother and her West Coast anarchist coterie, Parritt can no longer live with himself and dies, while Slade continues lying to himself and thereby lives."}
{"text":"The play contains many allusions to political topics, particularly anarchism and socialism. Hugo, Larry and Don are former members of an anarchist movement. Two other characters are veterans of the Second Boer War. One is British, and one is an Afrikaner. They alternately defend and insult each other, and there are many allusions to events in South Africa. Both wish to return to their home countries, but their families do not want them there."}
{"text":"Emma Goldman, whom O'Neill admired, inspired the play's anarchist subplot."}
{"text":"Joe is the only African American character, and makes several speeches about racial differences."}
{"text":"\"The Iceman Cometh\" is often compared to Maxim Gorky's \"The Lower Depths\", which may have been O'Neill's inspiration for his play."}
{"text":"O'Neill uses the phrase \"The Big Sleep\", but it is not known if this was an intentional or unintentional allusion to Raymond Chandler's use of it. In a letter to Hamish Hamilton dated May 18, 1950, Chandler wrote, \"He used it [ The Big Sleep ], so far as one can judge from the context, as a matter of course, apparently in the belief that it was an accepted underworld expression. If so, I'd like to see whence it comes, because I invented the expression. It is quite possible that I re-invented it, but I never saw it in print before . . .\""}
{"text":"When O'Neill was alive, he delayed its performance on Broadway for seven years, fearing American audiences would reject it. O'Neill was at the height of his fame when he relented in 1946, and the production was a commercial success, though it received mixed reviews."}
{"text":"James Barton, in his performance as Hickey, was reportedly not up to the massive emotional and physical demands of such a titanic part, and sometimes forgot his lines or wore out his voice."}
{"text":"The young Marlon Brando was offered the part of Don Parritt in the original Broadway production, but famously turned it down. Brando was able to read only a few pages of the script the producers gave him before falling asleep, and he later wrote a lengthy critique describing the work as \"ineptly written and poorly constructed\"."}
{"text":"1956: An Off-Broadway production staged after O'Neill's death featured Jason Robards as Hickey and was directed by Jos\u00e9 Quintero. This production was an unqualified success and established the play as a great modern tragedy."}
{"text":"1973: A Broadway revival staged at the Circle in the Square Theatre ran from December 13, 1973, to February 16, 1974, with James Earl Jones as Hickey."}
{"text":"1985: A Broadway revival staged at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre featured Jason Robards as Hickey with a cast that included Barnard Hughes as Harry Hope, Donald Moffat as Larry Slade, and again directed by Jos\u00e9 Quintero. It ran from September 29, 1985, to December 1, 1985."}
{"text":"1990: Chicago's Goodman Theatre mounted a production directed by Robert Falls, starring Brian Dennehy as Hickey, Jerome Kilty as Hope and James Cromwell as Slade."}
{"text":"1998: A London production featuring Kevin Spacey had a successful and critically acclaimed run through 1998 and 1999 at the Almeida Theatre and the Old Vic in London."}
{"text":"1999: A Broadway revival from the 1998 London production staged at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre with Kevin Spacey as Hickey. It ran from April 8, 1999, to July 17, 1999."}
{"text":"2012: A revival at Chicago's Goodman Theatre featured Nathan Lane in the lead role of Hickey, Brian Dennehy this time as Larry Slade, and was directed by Robert Falls. It started its run at the Goodman Theatre in April 2012, slated for a six-week engagement. It was a huge success for the Goodman Theater, whose management stated it was the most successful production in its history. This production omitted the character of Pat McGloin."}
{"text":"2015: The Goodman Theatre production directed by Falls, starring Lane and Dennehy and the rest of the original cast with the creative team from Chicago was produced at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a six-week engagement starting on February 5, 2015, that featured Nathan Lane and John Douglas Thompson. For his performance, Thompson won an Obie Award."}
{"text":"2018: Denzel Washington starred as Hickey and Tammy Blanchard as Cora, in a Broadway revival directed by George C. Wolfe. The production ran for 14 weeks at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, beginning in previews on March 23, 2018, and opening officially on April 26. The cast featured Frank Wood as Cecil Lewis, Bill Irwin as Ed Mosher, Reg Rogers as James Cameron, Colm Meaney as Harry Hope, and David Morse as Larry Slade. The sets were by Santo Loquasto, costumes by Ann Roth, and lighting design by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer."}
{"text":"1960: TV Production for Play of the Week on the National Telefim Associates (NTA) syndication network, directed by Sidney Lumet. This production featured Jason Robards as Hickey, Tom Pedi from the original 1947 stage production as Rocky Pioggi, Sorrell Booke as Hugo Kalmar, and Robert Redford as Don Parritt. It is presented as two separate episodes of the series due to the length of the work with a total run time of 210 minutes. It is notable in view of TV standards of the time that while much dialog was omitted for time, that which was retained was not changed to soften its language. For example, at the end of Hickey's breakdown Robards says the words \"that damned bitch\" exactly as O'Neill had written."}
{"text":"The 2013 short video game The Entertainment features numerous references to The Iceman Cometh, including characters named after Evelyn Hickman, Larry Slade, Harry Hope, and Pearl. The game was released as an interval work as part of Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer."}
{"text":"2020: \"The Iceman Cometh\" was broadcast as a two-part Zoom Premiere on YouTube Live as a benefit for the Actors Fund. The cast featured Austin Pendleton as Cecil Lewis, Arthur French as Joe Mott, Paul Navarra as Hickey, Patricia Cregan as Pearl, Mike Roche as Larry Slade, Holly O'Brien as Cora, Marygrace Navarra was the stage manager. The event was produced by Caroline Grace Productions, in association with the 2020 Theatre Company. The event was a benefit for the Actors Fund during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020."}
{"text":"Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a confessional collection of poetry written by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar. The collection of poetry is a personal narrative that follows a path through addiction and to recovery. Akbar claims this collection, along with a chapbook, \"Portrait of an Alcoholic,\" was his own personal way of processing what he experienced as an addict and even solidifying and making sense of his sobriety. The collection is written to mold what Akbar felt through not only the process of and recovery from addiction but elaborates on how Akbar's addiction completely isolated him from society and made the world around him so surreal."}
{"text":"Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar wrote this confessional poetry collection to share his experiences as an alcoholic. He elaborates on how ethereal the world around him feels and how isolated his own addiction has made him and writes of the path that he ventured on his way to recovery."}
{"text":"The themes of the collection center mainly around Akbar's path through addiction and finding his way to recovery. Akbar uses deft language to mentally recreate the isolation that addicts feel and how the world around them may feel hypnagogic or unreal. He tells of story of how a man transformed entirely, then had to push against addiction to become a new man to better life for oneself. The narrative highlights the enjoyments and agonies through addiction that could cause addicts to battle their own inclination and even isolate themselves from everything and everyone to fulfill their addictions, resulting in the loneliness Akbar experienced throughout."}
{"text":"The structure of the collection intends to display a transformation of a man into a new better man or the man inside changing oneself. The collection almost chronologically displays his enjoyment of being an alcoholic and being able to escape the world then the collection changes tones into the pain of addiction and the battling of self-persuasion to escape addiction. The poems then shift to a sense of recovery and coming to understand that instead of escaping the world that is around, find something to enjoy."}
{"text":"\"Calling a Wolf a Wolf\" was originally published by Alice James Books on September 12, 2017 in the United States and was later published by Penguin Books in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2018."}
{"text":"De conviviis barbaris or De convivis barbaris (Latin for \"On banquets of barbarians\" or \"On barbarian guests\") is an epigram preserved in the Codex Salmasianus (Paris, Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, Codex Parisinus Latinus, 10318) of the Latin Anthology, copied in Italy 800 AD. It is noted for containing a few words in a Germanic language that historians believe to be Gothic or Vandalic: in either case, this makes it a rare attestation of medieval East Germanic."}
{"text":"The poem's date of composition is unknown, but postulated to be penned between the sixth and eighth century AD. Although the text states that it is referring to Goths \"per se\", several features mark the Germanic words as Vandalic, and it is likely that the text simply uses the term 'Gothic' loosely: correspondingly, Procopius refers to the Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and Gepids as \"Gothic nations\" and opines that they \"are all of the Arian faith, and have one language called Gothic\"."}
{"text":"Translation of the Germanic words in the epigram is disputed, but the text means something like:"}
{"text":"There is no doubt that the text is hexametrical, although there has been dispute about the scansion. One likely interpretation is thus:"}
{"text":"\u012ant\u0115r \"\u0115|\u012bls\" G\u014ft\u012d|c\u016bm \"sc\u0103p\u012d|\u0101 m\u0103tz\u012d|\u0101 i\u0101 | dr\u012bnc\u0103n!\""}
{"text":"C\u0101ll\u012d\u014f|p\u0113 m\u0103d\u012d|d\u014d tr\u0115p\u012d|d\u0101t s\u0113 | i\u016bng\u0115r\u0115 | B\u0101cch\u014d."}
{"text":"n\u0113 p\u0115d\u012d|b\u016bs n\u014dn | st\u0113t || \u0113br\u012d\u0103 | M\u016bs\u0103 s\u016d|\u012bs."}
{"text":"The Wild Party is a book-length narrative poem, written by Joseph Moncure March."}
{"text":"Published in 1926 by Pascal Covici, Inc., the poem was widely banned, first in Boston, for having content viewed as lewd. The poem was a success notwithstanding, and perhaps in part due to, the controversy surrounding the work. March's subsequent projects were more mainstream."}
{"text":"The poem tells the story of show people Queenie and her lover Burrs, who live in a decadent style that March depicts as unique to Hollywood. They decide to have one of their parties, complete with illegal bathtub gin and the couple's colorful, eccentric and egocentric friends, but the party unfolds with more tumultuous goings-on than planned."}
{"text":"Some love is fire: some love is rust:"}
{"text":"But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust."}
{"text":"And their lust was tremendous. It had the feel"}
{"text":"Of hammers clanging; and stone; and steel:"}
{"text":"And torches of the savage, roaring kind"}
{"text":"That rip through iron, and strike men blind:"}
{"text":"Of long trains crashing through caverns under"}
{"text":"Of engines throbbing; and hoarse steam spouting;"}
{"text":"And feet tramping; and great crowds shouting."}
{"text":"A lust so savage, they could have wrenched"}
{"text":"The flesh from bone, and not have blenched."}
{"text":"\"The Wild Party\" was adapted into a film version in 1975, and two stage musicals, both produced in New York City in the same 1999\u20132000 theater season. Michael John LaChiusa's version, directed by George C. Wolfe was mounted on Broadway and the other version, by Andrew Lippa, performed off-Broadway. \"The Wild Party\" has been translated into French, German and Spanish."}
{"text":"An altered quote from the first two lines of \"Part II, ch. 9\" was used in the 1959 Ian Fleming novel \"Goldfinger\", although Fleming did not credit March. He also changed the word \"fiercest\" to \"finest\"."}
{"text":"Album des pavillons, short for the \"Album des pavillons nationaux et des marques distinctives\", is a flag book published by the French Service hydrographique et oc\u00e9anographique de la marine. The latest edition was published in 2000 by Armand du Payrat. The contents of the book contain flags, ensigns and standards of countries, including construction sheets and Pantone colors used to reproduce the flags."}
{"text":"The Banderia Prutenorum is a manuscript of 48 parchment sheets, 18.6 by 29.3\u00a0cm (7.3 by 11.5\u00a0inches), composed by Jan D\u0142ugosz and illuminated by Stanis\u0142aw Durink, listing 56 , or banners, of the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The title means \"Blazons of the Prussians\". \"Prutenorum\" is the genitive plural of \"Pruteni\", Prussians."}
{"text":"In Polish the name is \"Chor\u0105gwie Pruskie\". \"Chor\u0105gwie\" can mean \"banner\", \"standard\", or \"regiment\". The heraldic term blazon in English is probably the exact meaning."}
{"text":"The work describes the gonfalons, or battle flags, collected from the field after the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 AD. This battle was a major confrontation between the Teutonic Order and the allied forces of Poles and Lithuanians, whom the Order was trying to conquer. At that time, the Order had succeeded in subjecting or eliminating the western Balts, including the Prussians; however, the Teutonic Knights were decisively defeated by the joint forces of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the command of the Polish King W\u0142adys\u0142aw II Jagie\u0142\u0142o."}
{"text":"At the end of the battle, the major officers of the Order lay dead on the field beside the standards under which they had fought. Some units escaped with their standards. The Banderia does not describe all the Order's flags. The flags were collected and stored at Wawel Cathedral in Krak\u00f3w. They are known to have been there in 1603, after which they disappeared. They have been recreated, starting in 1900. In October 2009, as part of the preparations for the battle's anniversary, Polish scholars and artists in Krak\u00f3w have finished reconstructing all known standards."}
{"text":"It was probably the Polish historian, Jan D\u0142ugosz, who commissioned the painter, Stanis\u0142aw Durink of Krak\u00f3w, to illustrate the flags in 1448. D\u0142ugosz then wrote the Latin descriptions. The work thus has the format of a catalog, with an illumination and Latin entry for each flag."}
{"text":"The flag is decorated with a heraldic blazon identifying the \"\", or district, from which the soldiers of that unit came. The blazon might appear in any circumstances, such as in a coat of arms or on a shield, or in any conspicuous place. Its function was that of identification. The rules of heraldry were undoubtedly followed."}
{"text":"The title raises a few questions of language and society. In it a Polish scholar and historian is calling the conquerors of the Prussians by that very name, even though at the beginning of their conquest they found the name odious to them. Old Prussian speakers still lived in substantial numbers in east Prussia. As they were not excluded from military service, some must have fought for the order, and yet they are not distinguished from the Germans in any way."}
{"text":"\"Banderium\" is in origin neither Latin nor Polish, but comes from the Germanic. The place names also are in their Germanic forms rather than their Polish ones. Why D\u0142ugosz, a Polish historian, chose to use the Germanicized Prussian Latin is not clear."}
{"text":"By some miracle, the manuscript survived World War II, even though it was given to Malbork Castle by the Nazis for political purposes. After the war it showed up at a London auction house and was brought to its current location in the library of Jagiellonian University."}
{"text":"In the scholarly Latin of manuscript terminology, a \"recto\" page is \"on the right side\". The \"verso\" or \"turned side\" (the other side of the page) is therefore a left-hand page. This terminology has nothing to do with D\u0142ugosz."}
{"text":"Durink states the width (\"latitudo\") and length (\"longitudo\") of each flag in units he calls \"ulne\" (classical \"ulnae\"). These must be cubits rather than ells; i.e., one \"ulna\" is 18\u00a0inches by today's standard ell. The flags are generally longer than they are wide."}
{"text":"Page 1 recto bears the following introduction:"}
{"text":"Pro libraria universitatis studii Cracouiensis datum per dominum Johannem Dlugosch. Descriptio Prutenicae cladis seu crucigerorum sub Jagellone per Joannem Dlugosz canonicum Cracoviensem. Banderia Prutenorum anno domini millesimo quadringentesimo decimo in festo Divisionis Apostolorum erecta contra Polonie regem Wladislaum Jagyelno et per eundem regem prostrata et Cracouiam adducta ac in ecclesia catedrali suspensa, que, ut sequitur, in hune modum fuerunt depicta."}
{"text":"A translation directly from the Latin is:"}
{"text":"Given to the library of the university of study of Cracow by the master John D\u0142ugosz. Description of the Prussian ruin or (the ruin) of the cross-bearers through Jagiello by John Dlugosz, canon of Cracow. The blazons of the Prussians in the year of the Lord 1410 in the holiday of the Divisio Apostolorum (Dispersal of the Apostles), which were erected against the king of Poland, Wladislaw Jagiello, and were cast down by the same king and brought to Cracow and hung in the church cathedral, were depicted in this manner, as follows."}
{"text":"The description to which D\u0142ugosz refers is contained in the Latin notes with the flags."}
{"text":"Culm, Pomesania, Graudenz, Balga, Schonsze, Stargard, Sambia, Tuchel, Stuhm, Nessau, Westphalia, Rogasen, Elbing, Engelsburg, Strasburg, Che\u0142m, Brettchen and Neumark, Braunsberg."}
{"text":"American City Flags is a special double volume issue of \"\", a peer-reviewed journal published by the North American Vexillological Association. It is the first comprehensive work on the subject, documenting the municipal flags of the largest 100 U.S. cities, all 50 state capitals, and at least two cities in each state. Each article describes in detail the flag\u2019s design, adoption date, proportions, symbolism, selection, designer, and predecessors."}
{"text":"Earl Wilbert Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: \"Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.\" As Bernardine Evaristo notes, \"Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.\""}
{"text":"Lovelace's first novel, \"While Gods Are Falling\", published in 1965, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum, and he is the author of five subsequent well received novels, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning \"Salt\" (1996) and, most recently, \"Is Just a Movie\", winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He has also written drama, essays, short stories and children's books. The artist Che Lovelace is his son."}
{"text":"Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940\u201347), Nelson Street Boys' R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948\u201353, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate)."}
{"text":"He worked at the \"Trinidad Guardian\" as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954\u201356) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956\u201366). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia, in north-eastern Trinidad, as a forest ranger. He also had a posting as Agricultural Officer in Rio Claro in the south-east of the island. As Kenneth Ramchand has noted, \"In the rural context [Lovelace] attended stick fights, wakes, village festivals and dances. He played cricket and football, and gambled in the rum shop with the villagers. He joined up to take part in the Best Village Competitions. He was living among ordinary people as one of them, and as an artist observing.\""}
{"text":"In 1962 his first novel, \"While Gods Are Falling\", won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by BP, after which he spent two years in Tobago, marrying in April 1964. \"While Gods Are Falling\" would be published in Britain by Collins in 1965."}
{"text":"From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist."}
{"text":"He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971\u201373), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa."}
{"text":"He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995\u201396), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996\u201397), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999\u20132004)."}
{"text":"Lovelace was Trinidad and Tobago's artistic director for Carifesta, the Caribbean Festival of Arts, which was held in the country in 1992, 1995 and 2006."}
{"text":"He is a columnist for the \"Trinidad Express\", and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including \"Voices\", \"South\", and \"Wasafiri\". Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. He is the president of the Association of Caribbean Writers."}
{"text":"Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled \"A Writer In His Place\"."}
{"text":"In July 2015, to mark his 80th birthday, Lovelace was honoured by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest with celebrations in Tobago, including film screenings."}
{"text":"He is the subject of a 2017 biography by Funso Aiyejina."}
{"text":"At the same time as his writing has brought him international prestige and awards, \"Lovelace has been valued by readers in his own country for his story-telling, for the vividness of his characters, for the ease and energy of his language, for his celebration of the creole or island-born culture, and for the way his writing makes people feel good about the selves they see in the mirror of his art.\""}
{"text":"When Lovelace's first novel, \"While Gods Are Falling\", was published in 1965, C. L. R. James hailed \"a new type of writer, a new type of prose, a different type of work\"."}
{"text":"In 1968, Lovelace published his second novel, \"The Schoolmaster\", for which \"he invented a language to represent the people of Kumaca, a remote Spanish Creole village of timbered hills, fertile valleys and clear cool rivers that comes breathtakingly alive in Lovelace\u2019s descriptive prose. ... The Schoolmaster can be read as a celebration of the natural world and the attuned people in it; as a parable about the perils of transition from small island to modern nation; and most obviously as a satire about education in a colonial context.\""}
{"text":"Lovelace's 1979 novel, \"The Dragon Can't Dance\", has been described as \"a defining and luminously sensitive portrait of postcolonial island life. ...A poignant, beautifully crafted tale about a man and his country on the cusp of change.\" Considered his best known work, \"The Dragon Can't Dance\" is \"a wildly exuberant paean to Trinidad\u2019s carnival traditions and the calypsonians who challenged British rule in the wake of the second world war.\""}
{"text":"In 1982, Lovelace published the novel \"The Wine of Astonishment\", which deals with the struggle of a Spiritual Baptist community, from the passing of the prohibition ordinance until the ban, the story \"animated by a Creole narrative voice\" as in other work by Lovelace."}
{"text":"Summing up his 1996 novel, \"Salt\", \"Publishers Weekly\" said: \"Using language that's as lush as the foliage of Trinidad and dialogue as vivid as the Caribbean, Lovelace creates a parable that applies to any nation struggling with unresolved racial issues and to any people struggling to free themselves from their past.\" \"Salt\" won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 International Dublin Literary Award."}
{"text":"Lovelace has also written plays (some collected in \"Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays\", 1984), short stories (collected in \"A Brief Conversion and Other Stories\", 1988), essays, and a children's book, as well as journalism."}
{"text":"The Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, holds the Earl Lovelace manuscripts. The papers mainly consists of typed and handwritten notes, drafts and manuscripts of Lovelace's published output \u2014 novels, plays and short stories. Manuscripts of the following novels are included: \"The Schoolmaster\"; \"The Dragon Can't Dance\";\"While Gods are Falling\"; \"The Wine of Astonishment\"; \"Salt\". The collection also includes some unpublished work including poetry."}
{"text":"His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel \"Salt\". Earl Lovelace has collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on projects including writing the 2004 feature film \"Joebell and America\", based on his short story of the same title, on which his son Walt Lovelace was the director of photography and editor, and Che was the art director."}
{"text":"Joseph Robert Love, known as Dr. Robert Love (2 October 1839 \u2013 21 November 1914), was a 19th-century Bahamian-born medical doctor, clergyman, teacher, journalist, politician and Pan-Africanist. He lived, studied, and worked successively in the Bahamas, the United States of America, Haiti, and Jamaica. Love spent the last decades of his life in Jamaica, where he held political office, published a newspaper, and advocated for the island's black majority."}
{"text":"Love was born in the Bahamas on 2 October 1839. He got primary education and was influence by the Anglican Church during this period. Later he became a teacher in Bahamas."}
{"text":"In the late 1860s, He went to United States. In June 1871, he became clergy in Trinity Church, New York and transferred to the Church of St. Stephen, Savannah in December. In 1872, claiming about the discrimination to people of darker color there, he left Church of St. Stephen, Savannah and established St. Augustine's mission that mainly consist of black people; during this period he also managed schools for black children. In 1876 he left the mission and left for Buffalo."}
{"text":"In Buffalo, he was Rector of St. Philip's until 1878. From 1877 he started to study at the University of Buffalo and in 1880 he obtained a medical degree."}
{"text":"In 1881, Love moved to Haiti, where he served as the rector of an Anglican church in Port-au-Prince. He was forced to end his career in church due to a quarrel, and he became a doctor in the Haitian army that engaged with the revolt in Haiti. During his time in Haiti he experienced grave difficulty in politics. In 1889, he was eventually expelled. He went to Kingston, Jamaica and failed in his attempts to return to Haiti."}
{"text":"In Jamaica, he started the \"Jamaica Advocate\" newspaper in December 1894, which became an influential newspaper on the island. Love used the paper as a forum to express his concern for the living conditions of Jamaica's black population. He was a staunch advocate of access to education for the majority of the population. He believed that girls, like boys, should receive secondary school education."}
{"text":"Love piloted a voter registration drive, as a means of empowering the black majority, and challenging white minority rule. The white elite in the Colony of Jamaica worried that Love was filling the heads of black people with dangerous ideas of racial equality. John Vassall Calder claimed that black people lacked the mental capacities to thrive, and stated: \u201cDr. Love must remember that his ancestors were my ancestors\u2019 slaves...He could never be my equal. He is aggrieved because my forefathers rescued him from the bonds of thraldom and deprived him the privilege of being King of the Congo, enjoying the epicurean and conjugal orgies and the sacrificial pleasures of his ancestral home in Africa.\u201d"}
{"text":"The white establishment viewed Love with as much suspicion as they did the pan-African Native Baptish preacher, Alexander Bedward. However, Love always thought Bedward to be nothing more than a skilled showman whom a hysterical establishment had managed to turn into a martyr."}
{"text":"Love helped black candidates to get elected to the Council, which advised the government. In 1906, Love himself won the Saint Andrew Parish seat of the Legislative Council in general elections. He also served as chairman of the Saint Andrew Parochial Board, as well as a justice of the peace in Kingston, the Kingston General Commissions and as a trustee of Wolmer's schools. Love published two works, \"Romanism is Not Christianity\" (1892), and \"St. Peter's True Position in the Church, Clearly Traced in the Bible\" (1897)."}
{"text":"Love's health began to deteriorate, and by 1910 he had been forced to end his political career. He died on 21 November 1914, and was buried in the parish church yard at Half Way Tree, near the city of Kingston. Love's activism in favour of Jamaica's economically depressed black majority influenced later Jamaican and Caribbean activists, including Marcus Garvey."}
{"text":"The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is a 1993 history book about a distinct black Atlantic culture that incorporated elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean cultures. It was written by Paul Gilroy and was published by Harvard University Press and Verso Books."}
{"text":"\"Bars Fight\" is a ballad poem written by Lucy Terry about an attack upon two white families by Native Americans on August 25, 1746. The incident occurred in an area of Deerfield called \"The Bars\", which was a colonial term for a meadow. The poem was preserved orally and not published until 1855, in Josiah Gilbert Holland's \"History of Western Massachusetts\"."}
{"text":"It is believed to be the oldest known work of literature by an African American and is the only known work by Lucy Terry."}
{"text":"The text of the ballad from Holland's \"History of Western Massachusetts\", 1855:"}
{"text":"The names of whom I'll not leave out."}
{"text":"And though he was so brave and bold,"}
{"text":"His face no more shall we behold."}
{"text":"Which caused his friends much grief and pain."}
{"text":"Not many rods distant from his head."}
{"text":"Did lose his life which was so dear."}
{"text":"And hopes to save herself by running,"}
{"text":"And had not her petticoats stopped her,"}
{"text":"The awful creatures had not catched her,"}
{"text":"Nor tommy hawked her on her head,"}
{"text":"And left her on the ground for dead."}
{"text":"After its 1855 publication the poem was undiscovered until 1942, when it was published in Lorenzo Greene's \"The Negro in Colonial New England 1620\u20131776\". Unfortunately, this youthful occasional poem is the only surviving work by Terry, who was said to have been a prolific poet. Recent scholarship has instead drawn attention to how Terry evokes her participation in the local community by recounting the names of the men and women who fought alongside her, and how the town responded by preserving the poem and her name in their oral histories."}
{"text":"The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards."}
{"text":"Edwards published \"The Practice of Diaspora\" with Harvard University Press in 2003."}
{"text":"In addition to the DuBois reference, Edwards also draws on Stuart Hall and the concept of articulation to develop a theoretical use of the French word d\u00e9calage, \"referring to a shift in space or time or the gap that results from it, and applies the term to describe the way in which members of the black diaspora share similar conditions of oppression yet often find ourselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum\u2014for example, black writers seeking solace from Jim Crow in Paris, while simultaneously Africans were struggling against French colonialism. These countering political locations create tensions within our diaspora, but Edwards does not see these sites of difference as global movement killer...[instead] that these disparate locations are, like joints, sites of potential forward motion.\""}
{"text":"For \"The Practice of Diaspora\", Edwards won the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association."}
{"text":"Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875, sixteen African Americans had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their newfound civil empowerment."}
{"text":"The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was denounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. During the mid-to-late 1870s, racist whites organized in the Democratic Party launched a murderous campaign of racist terrorism to regain political power throughout the South. From 1890 to 1908, they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats."}
{"text":"Most of the future leading lights of what was to become known as the \"Harlem Renaissance\" movement arose from a generation that had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Sometimes their parents, grandparents - or they themselves - had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education."}
{"text":"Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early 20th century Great Migration out of the South into the African-American neighborhoods of the Northeast and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem."}
{"text":"Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York."}
{"text":"Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers\u2014who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters\u2014came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories."}
{"text":"The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of \"Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater\" took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays \"the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater\"."}
{"text":"Another landmark came in 1919, when the communist poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet \"If We Must Die\", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems \"Invocation\" and \"Harlem Dancer\". Published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica. Although \"If We Must Die\" never alluded to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th-century United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression."}
{"text":"In 1917 Hubert Harrison, \"The Father of Harlem Radicalism\", founded the Liberty League and \"The Voice\", the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the \"New Negro Movement.\" Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had \"Poetry for the People\" and book review sections). In 1927, in the \"Pittsburgh Courier\", Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the \"Negro Literary Renaissance\" notion overlooked \"the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present,\" and said the so-called \"renaissance\" was largely a white invention."}
{"text":"Nevertheless, with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African-American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage \"to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.\" Alain Locke's anthology \"The New Negro\" was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution. The anthology featured several African-American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Zora Neale Hurston and communists Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, to the lesser-known, like the poet Anne Spencer."}
{"text":"Many poets of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired to tie in threads of African-American culture into their poems; as a result, jazz poetry was heavily developed during this time. \"The Weary Blues\" was a notable jazz poem written by Langston Hughes. Through their works of literature, black authors were able to give a voice to the African-American identity, as well as strive for a community of support and acceptance."}
{"text":"Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers and social critics discussed the role of"}
{"text":"Christianity in African-American lives. For example, a famous poem by Langston Hughes, \"Madam and the Minister\", reflects the temperature and mood towards religion in the Harlem Renaissance."}
{"text":"The cover story for \"The Crisis\" magazine\u2032s publication in May 1936 explains how important Christianity was regarding the proposed union of the three largest Methodist churches of 1936. This article shows the controversial question of unification for these churches."}
{"text":"The article \"The Catholic Church and the Negro Priest\", also published in \"The Crisis\", January 1920, demonstrates the obstacles African-American priests faced in the Catholic Church. The article confronts what it saw as policies based on race that excluded African Americans from higher positions in the church."}
{"text":"Various forms of religious worship existed during this time of African-American intellectual reawakening."}
{"text":"Although there were racist attitudes within the current Abrahamic religious arenas many African Americans continued to push towards the practice of a more inclusive doctrine. For example, George Joseph MacWilliam presents various experiences, during his pursuit towards priesthood, of rejection on the basis of his color and race yet he shares his frustration in attempts to incite action on the part of \"The Crisis\" magazine community."}
{"text":"There were other forms of spiritualism practiced among African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of these religions and philosophies were inherited from African ancestry. For example, the religion of Islam was present in Africa as early as the 8th century through the Trans-Saharan trade. Islam came to Harlem likely through the migration of members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which was established in 1913 in New Jersey. Various forms of Judaism were practiced, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism, but it was Black Hebrew Israelites that founded their religious belief system during the early 20th century in the Harlem Renaissance. Traditional forms of religion acquired from various parts of Africa were inherited and practiced during this era. Some common examples were Voodoo and Santeria."}
{"text":"Religious critique during this era was found in music, literature, art, theater and poetry. The Harlem Renaissance encouraged analytic dialogue that included the open critique and the adjustment of current religious ideas."}
{"text":"One of the major contributors to the discussion of African-American renaissance culture was Aaron Douglas who, with his artwork, also reflected the revisions African Americans were making to the Christian dogma. Douglas uses biblical imagery as inspiration to various pieces of art work but with the rebellious twist of an African influence."}
{"text":"Countee Cullen's poem \"Heritage\" expresses the inner struggle of an African American between his past African heritage and the new Christian culture. A more severe criticism of the Christian religion can be found in Langston Hughes' poem \"Merry Christmas\", where he exposes the irony of religion as a symbol for good and yet a force for oppression and injustice."}
{"text":"A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor African Americans and socially elite African Americans. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the south, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy African Americans now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all-time high."}
{"text":"Innovation and liveliness were important characteristics of performers in the beginnings of jazz. Jazz performers and composers at the time such as Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Jelly Roll Morton, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie \"The Lion\" Smith, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills and bandleaders Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson were extremely talented, skillful, competitive and inspirational. They are still considered as having laid great parts of the foundations for future musicians of their genre."}
{"text":"Duke Ellington gained popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. According to Charles Garrett, \"The resulting portrait of Ellington reveals him to be not only the gifted composer, bandleader, and musician we have come to know, but also an earthly person with basic desires, weaknesses, and eccentricities.\" Ellington did not let his popularity get to him. He remained calm and focused on his music."}
{"text":"During the Harlem Renaissance, the black clothing scene took a dramatic turn from the prim and proper. Many young women preferred- from short skirts and silk stockings to drop-waisted dresses and cloche hats. Woman wore loose-fitted garments and accessorized with long strand pearl bead necklaces, feather boas, and cigarette holders. The fashion of the Harlem Renaissance was used to convey elegance and flamboyancy and needed to be created with the vibrant dance style of the 1920s in mind. Popular by the 1930s was a trendy, egret-trimmed beret."}
{"text":"Men wore loose suits that led to the later style known as the \"Zoot,\" which consisted of wide-legged, high-waisted, peg-top trousers, and a long coat with padded shoulders and wide lapels. Men also wore wide-brimmed hats, colored socks, white gloves, and velvet-collared Chesterfield coats. During this period, African Americans expressed respect for their heritage through a fad for leopard-skin coats, indicating the power of the African animal."}
{"text":"The extraordinarily successful black dancer Josephine Baker, though performing in Paris during the height of the Renaissance, was a major fashion trendsetter for black and white women alike. Her gowns from the couturier Jean Patou were much copied, especially her stage costumes, which \"Vogue\" magazine called \"startling.\" Josephine Baker is also credited for highlighting the \"art deco\" fashion era after she performed the \"Danse Sauvage\". During this Paris performance she adorned a skirt made of string and artificial bananas. Ethel Moses was another popular black performer, Moses starred in silent films in the 1920s and 30s and was recognizable by her signature bob hairstyle."}
{"text":"Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to \"uplift\" the race."}
{"text":"There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles, including a Pan-African perspective, \"high-culture\" and \"low-culture\" or \"low-life,\" from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that numerous African-American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life."}
{"text":"Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for elite white audiences, and the question of how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban North."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African-American involvement. It rested on a support system of black patrons, black-owned businesses and publications. However, it also depended on the patronage of white Americans, such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise might have remained closed to the publication of work outside the black American community. This support often took the form of patronage or publication. Carl Van Vechten was one of the most noteworthy white Americans involved with the Harlem Renaissance. He allowed for assistance to the black American community because he wanted racial sameness."}
{"text":"There were other whites interested in so-called \"primitive\" cultures, as many whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to see such \"primitivism\" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. As with most fads, some people may have been exploited in the rush for publicity."}
{"text":"Interest in African-American lives also generated experimental but lasting collaborative work, such as the all-black productions of George Gershwin's opera \"Porgy and Bess\", and Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's \"Four Saints in Three Acts\". In both productions the choral conductor Eva Jessye was part of the creative team. Her choir was featured in \"Four Saints\". The music world also found white band leaders defying racist attitudes to include the best and the brightest African-American stars of music and song in their productions."}
{"text":"The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand for equality. The Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream houses. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time. The new fiction attracted a great amount of attention from the nation at large. Among authors who became nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Omar Al Amiri, Eric D. Walrond and Langston Hughes."}
{"text":"Richard Bruce Nugent (1906\u20131987) who wrote \"Smoke, Lilies, and Jade\" is an important contribution, especially in relation to experimental form and LGBT themes in the period."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II protest movement of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists who rose to creative maturity afterward were inspired by this literary movement."}
{"text":"The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, as it possessed a certain sociological development\u2014particularly through a new racial consciousness\u2014through ethnic pride, as seen in the Back to Africa movement led by Jamaican Marcus Garvey. At the same time, a different expression of ethnic pride, promoted by W. E. B. Du Bois, introduced the notion of the \"talented tenth\". Du Bois' wrote of the Talented Tenth:"}
{"text":"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst."}
{"text":"These \"talented tenth\" were considered the finest examples of the worth of black Americans as a response to the rampant racism of the period. No particular leadership was assigned to the talented tenth, but they were to be emulated. In both literature and popular discussion, complex ideas such as Du Bois's concept of \"twoness\" (dualism) were introduced (see \"The Souls of Black Folk\"; 1903). Du Bois explored a divided awareness of one's identity that was a unique critique of the social ramifications of racial consciousness. This exploration was later revived during the Black Pride movement of the early 1970s."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity led to a greater social consciousness, and African Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally."}
{"text":"The progress\u2014both symbolic and real\u2014during this period became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy, as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s."}
{"text":"The urban setting of rapidly developing Harlem provided a venue for African Americans of all backgrounds to appreciate the variety of Black life and culture. Through this expression, the Harlem Renaissance encouraged the new appreciation of folk roots and culture. For instance, folk materials and spirituals provided a rich source for the artistic and intellectual imagination, which freed Blacks from the establishment of past condition. Through sharing in these cultural experiences, a consciousness sprung forth in the form of a united racial identity."}
{"text":"However, there was some pressure within certain groups of the Harlem Renaissance to adopt sentiments of conservative white America in order to be taken seriously by the mainstream. The result being that queer culture, while far-more accepted in Harlem than most places in the country at the time, was most fully lived out in the smoky dark lights of bars, nightclubs, and cabarets in the city. It was within these venues that the blues music scene boomed, and since it had not yet gained recognition within popular culture, queer artists used it as a way to express themselves honestly."}
{"text":"Even though there were factions within the Renaissance that were accepting of queer culture\/lifestyles, one could still be arrested for engaging in homosexual acts. Many people, including author Alice Dunbar Nelson and \"The Mother of Blues\" Gertrude \"Ma\" Rainey, had husbands but were romantically linked to other women as well."}
{"text":"Ma Rainey was known to dress in traditionally male clothing and her blues lyrics often reflected her sexual proclivities for women, which was extremely radical at the time. Ma Rainey was also the first person to introduce blues music into vaudeville. Rainey's prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Bessie Smith was another artist who used the blues as a way to express herself with such lines as \"When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look em' over and try to understand: They'll go to those parties \u2013 have the lights down low \u2013 only those parties where women can go.\""}
{"text":"Another prominent blues singer was Gladys Bentley, who was known to cross-dress. Bentley was the club owner of Clam House on 133rd Street in Harlem, which was a hub for queer patrons. The Hamilton Lodge in Harlem hosted an annual drag ball that attracted thousands to watch as a couple hundred young men came to dance the night away in drag. Though there were safe havens within Harlem, there were prominent voices such as that of Abyssinian Baptist Church's minister Adam Clayton who actively campaigned against homosexuality."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance gave birth to the idea of The New Negro. The New Negro movement was an effort to define what it meant to be African-American by African Americans rather than let the degrading stereotypes and caricatures found in black face minstrelsy practices to do so. There was also The Neo-New Negro movement, which not only challenged racial definitions and stereotypes, but also sought to challenge gender roles, normative sexuality, and sexism in America in general. In this respect, the Harlem Renaissance was far ahead of the rest of America in terms of embracing feminism and queer culture."}
{"text":"These ideals received some push back as freedom of sexuality, particularly pertaining to women (which during the time in Harlem was known as women-loving women), was seen as confirming the stereotype that black women were loose and lacked sexual discernment. The black bourgeoisie saw this as hampering the cause of black people in America and giving fuel to the fire of racist sentiments around the country. Yet for all of the efforts by both sectors of white and conservative black America, queer culture and artists defined major portions of not only the Harlem Renaissance, but also define so much of our culture today. Author of \"The Black Man's Burden\", Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that the Harlem Renaissance \"was surely as gay as it was black\"."}
{"text":"The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to whites. Magazines such as \"The Crisis\", a monthly journal of the NAACP, and \"Opportunity\", an official publication of the National Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African-American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines."}
{"text":"A major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the relationship between black writers and white publishers, but he was critical of works such as Claude McKay's bestselling novel \"Home to Harlem\" (1928) for appealing to the \"prurient demand[s]\" of white readers and publishers for portrayals of black \"licentiousness\"."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay \"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain\" (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought. Hughes in his writings also returned to the theme of racial passing, but during the Harlem Renaissance, he began to explore the topic of homosexuality and homophobia. He began to use disruptive language in his writings. He explored this topic because it was a theme that during this time period was not discussed."}
{"text":"African-American musicians and writers were among mixed audiences as well, having experienced positive and negative outcomes throughout the New Negro Movement. For musicians, Harlem, New York\u2019s cabarets and nightclubs shined a light on black performers and allowed for black residents to enjoy music and dancing. However, some of the most popular clubs (that showcased black musicians) were \"exclusively\" for white audiences; one of the most famous white-only nightclubs in Harlem was the Cotton Club, where popular black musicians like Duke Ellington frequently performed. Ultimately, the black musicians who appeared at these white-only clubs became far more successful and became a part of the mainstream music scene."}
{"text":"Similarly, black writers were given the opportunity to shine once the New Negro Movement gained traction as short stories, novels, and poems by black authors began taking form and getting into various print publications in the 1910s and 1920s. Although a seemingly good way to establish their identities and culture, many authors note how hard it was for any of their work to actually go anywhere. Writer Charles Chesnutt in 1877, for example, notes that there was no indication of his race alongside his publication in \"Atlantic Monthly\" (at the publisher\u2019s request)."}
{"text":"A prominent factor in the New Negro\u2019s struggle was that their work had been made out to be \"different\" or \"exotic\" to white audiences, making a necessity for black writers to appeal to them and compete with each other to get their work out. Famous black author and poet Langston Hughes explained that black-authored works were placed in a similar fashion to those of oriental or foreign origin, only being used occasionally in comparison to their white-made counterparts: once a spot for a black work was \"taken\", black authors had to look elsewhere to publish."}
{"text":"Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without debate, and without scrutiny. One of these was the future of the \"New Negro\". Artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance echoed American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future. This progressivist worldview rendered Black intellectuals\u2014just like their White counterparts\u2014unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities."}
{"text":"Mosaic is a literary magazine, published by the nonprofit Literary Freedom Project, which focuses on African-American and African diaspora literature. They began publishing in 1998, and are located in the Bronx, NY. The magazine is published on a triannual basis in February, June, and October."}
{"text":"Fire!! was an African-American literary magazine published in New York City in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance. The publication was started by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. After it published one issue, its quarters burned down, and the magazine ended."}
{"text":"\"Fire!!\" was conceived to express the African-American experience during the Harlem Renaissance in a modern and realistic fashion, using literature as a vehicle of enlightenment. The magazine's founders wanted to express the changing attitudes of younger African Americans. In \"Fire!!\" they explored controversial issues in the Black community, such as homosexuality, bisexuality, interracial relationships, promiscuity, prostitution, and color prejudice."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes wrote that the name was intended to symbolize their goal \"to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past ... into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists, and provide us with an outlet for publication not available in the limited pages of the small Negro magazines then existing.\" The magazine's headquarters burned to the ground shortly after it published its first issue, ending its operations."}
{"text":"But, \"The Bookman\" applauded the journal's unique qualities and its personality. Although this magazine had only one issue, \"this single issue of \"Fire!!\" is considered an event of historical importance.\""}
{"text":"The magazine covered a variety of literary genres: it includes a novella, an essay, stories, plays, drawings and illustrations, and poetry."}
{"text":"The story of the rise and fall of \"Fire!!\" is showcased in the 2004 movie \"Brother to Brother.\" It features a gay African-American college student named Perry Williams. he befriends an elderly gay African American named Bruce Nugent. Williams learns that Nugent was a writer and co-founder of \"Fire!!,\" and associated with other notable writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance."}
{"text":"The Negro Society for Historical Research was an organization founded by John Edward Bruce and Arthur Alfonso Schomburg in 1911."}
{"text":"Bruce and Schomburg originally met because of their Masonic involvement and began attending a Sunday Men's Club that met in Bruce's apartment. The NSHR, based in Yonkers, New York, aimed to create an institute to support Pan-African\u2014African, West Indian and Afro-American\u2014scholarly efforts. Schomburg stated \"We need a collection or list of books written by our own men and women... We need the historian and philosopher to give us, with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us.\""}
{"text":"When the organization disbanded, the collection later became the foundation for NYPL's Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and Art which became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem."}
{"text":"The American Negro Academy (ANA), founded in Washington, DC in 1897, was the first organization in the United States to support African-American academic scholarship. It operated until 1928, and encouraged African Americans to undertake classical academic studies and liberal arts."}
{"text":"It was intended to provide support to African Americans working in classic scholarship and the arts, as promoted by W.E.B. Du Bois in his essays about the Talented Tenth, and others of the elite. This was in contrast to Booker T. Washington's approach to education at Tuskegee University in Alabama, which he led. There he emphasized vocational and industrial training for southern blacks, which he thought were more practical for the lives that most blacks would live in the rural, segregated South."}
{"text":"The founders of the ANA were primarily authors, scholars, and artists. They included Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal priest and Republican from New York City, who had also worked in Liberia for two decades and founded the first independent black Episcopal church in Washington, DC; John Wesley Cromwell of Washington, DC; Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and writer in Washington; Walter B. Hayson; Archibald Grimk\u00e9 (brother of Francis), attorney and writer; and scientist Kelly Miller. Crummell served as founding president."}
{"text":"Their first meeting on March 5, 1897 included eighteen members:"}
{"text":"The Academy was organized in 1897 in Washington, D.C. Black newspapers expressed excitement that the Academy would have possibilities to serve a large audience, seeking to elevate the race through educational enlightenment. Through an assessment of statistical tends, mainly concerning black illiteracy, the Academy planned its work to be published in its Occasional Papers. The scholarly contributions aided the spirit of blacks in the South, who were being disenfranchised by white-dominated legislatures, who also imposed Jim Crow laws."}
{"text":"The ANA was part of the early struggle for equal rights for blacks,seeking to support their academic efforts. It was organized shortly after the United States Supreme Court had upheld the principle of \"separate but equal\" in the 1896 case, \"Plessy v. Ferguson.\""}
{"text":"DuBois suggested that a Talented Tenth of African Americans, primarily composed of blacks trained in classical higher education, could lead in educating masses of black citizens. He knew that most of the latter, who still lived in the rural South, would likely work in rural or unskilled jobs. But he wanted to provide opportunities for blacks who could surpass those limits. Through a publication of works among the Academy's Occasional Papers, the group wanted to expand the reach of its scholarship. As Crummel said, to aid the black intellectual's efforts to have influence on \u201chis schools, academies and colleges; and then enters his pulpits; and so filters down into his families and his homes\u2026to be a laborer with intelligence, enlightenment and manly ambitions\u201d."}
{"text":"Scholars have disputed the influence of the Academy. Dr. Alfred A. Moss Jr. argued for its efficacy in \"The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth\". In his analysis of a collection of private letters written by Crummell, Moss said that nearly from the beginning, the Academy was bound to decline. It was unable to consistently organize; it struggled to recruit new members, and especially to raise scholarship funds for the education of more students. Moss claims that founding member Archibald Henry Grimk\u00e9 expressed in his writings an understanding of the difficulties and socio-economic hardships among African Americans, but, given efforts to unseat him as ANA president, he spent more effort on self-serving interests."}
{"text":"Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends\u2014Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield\u2014and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of \"racial passing\", and is a key element of the novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic events."}
{"text":"Larsen's exploration of race was informed by her own mixed racial heritage and the increasingly common practice of racial passing in the 1920s. Praised upon publication, the novel has since been celebrated in modern scholarship for its complex depiction of race, gender and sexuality, and is the subject of considerable scholarly criticism. As one of only two novels that Larsen wrote, \"Passing\" has been significant in placing its author at the forefront of several literary canons."}
{"text":"Larsen refers to the case near the end of the novel, when Irene wonders about the consequences of Jack discovering Clare's racial status: \"What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the \"Rhinelander\" case.\" The case received substantial coverage in the press of the time, and Larsen could assume that it was common knowledge to her readers."}
{"text":"The story is written as a third person narrative from the perspective of Irene Redfield, a mixed-race woman who lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City."}
{"text":"Part Two of the book, \"Re-encounter,\" returns to the present, with Irene having received the new letter from Clare. After Irene ignores Clare's letter, Clare visits in person so Irene reluctantly agrees to see her. When it is brought up that Irene serves on the committee for the \"Negro Welfare League\" (NWL) Clare invites herself to their upcoming dance despite Irene's advice against it for fear that Jack will find out. Clare attends the dance and enjoys herself without her husband finding out, which encourages her to continue spending time in Harlem. Irene and Clare resume their childhood companionship, and Clare frequently visits Irene's home."}
{"text":"\"Passing\" has been described as \"the tragic story of a beautiful light-skinned mulatto passing for white in high society.\" The tragic mulatto (also \"mulatta\" when referring to a woman) is a stock character in early African-American literature. Such accounts often featured the light-skinned offspring of a white slaveholder and his black slave, whose mixed heritage in a race-based society means that she is unable to identify or find a place with either blacks or whites. The resulting feeling of exclusion was portrayed as variably manifested in self-loathing, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and attempts at suicide."}
{"text":"On the surface, \"Passing\" conforms to that stereotype in its portrayal of Clare Kendry, whose passing for white has tragic consequences; however, the book resists the conventions of the genre, as Clare refuses to feel the expected anguish at the betrayal of her black identity and socializes with blacks for the purposes of excitement rather than racial solidarity. Scholars have more generally considered \"Passing\" as a novel in which the major concern is not race. For instance, Claudia Tate describes the issue as \"merely a mechanism for setting the story in motion, sustaining the suspense, and bringing about the external circumstances for the story's conclusion.\""}
{"text":"As scholars show, race is not the only primary concern in Nella Larsen's \"Passing\". Class is also a major aspect that is simultaneously developed. Both of the main characters Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry present a strong sense of class. They also demonstrate how they cross clearly defined class borders in order to obtain more power in their life."}
{"text":"Scholar Sami Schalk argues that the notion of eugenic ideology emerges in the novel. Eugenic Ideology assigns specific behavioral and physical traits to different distinctions of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. Both physical and behavioral features of this ideology are discussed by the main characters in \"Passing\", Irene and Clare. For example, several times in the novel, Irene acknowledges the way white people racially designate physical traits to African Americans in order to identify them. The concept of eugenic ideology also emerges when Clare's aunts assign her to a domestic servant role believing this would align with her skin color. Thus, the aunt's perceptions of Clare's work are distinctly categorized through race."}
{"text":"Schalk further suggests that the novel resists these notions of eugenic ideology by emphasizing how characters pass fluidly between racial identities and resist clear categories of identity. In the novel, Clare Kendry hides her racial identity from her husband and is able to travel to places where African Americans are not allowed entry because no one can denote her black heritage from her behavior. In addition, Irene notes several times in the novel that the physical traits white people assign to African Americans are ridiculous. She, too, is able to pass in places where African Americans are not allowed entry and therefore defies racial categorization. The novel resists eugenic distinctions by highlighting the fluid transitions between races."}
{"text":"According to scholar Deborah McDowell, Larsen wanted to tell the story of black women with sexual desires, but the novelist also had to be constrained in that she wanted to establish \"black women as respectable\" in black middle-class terms. As an example, in the novel, Irene is portrayed as sexually repressed. Irene has a tenuous relationship with her husband Brian. In fact, they have separate rooms. McDowell believes that Irene is confused by her sexual feelings for Clare, which are much more apparent. McDowell argues that the story is about \"Irene's awakening sexual desire towards Clare\"."}
{"text":"The character of her husband, Brian, has been subject to a similar interpretation: Irene's labeling of him as and his oft-expressed desire to go to Brazil, a country then widely thought to be more tolerant of homosexuality than the United States was, are given as evidence. It is also shown that Brazil is considered to be a place with more relaxed ideas about race. Irene begins to believe that Clare and Brian are having an affair to hide or distract from her own feelings for Clare. McDowell writes, \"the awakening of Irene's erotic feelings for Clare coincides with Irene's imagination of an affair between Clare and Brian\". Although she had no reason to accuse him, Irene did so to protect herself from her own sexual desires."}
{"text":"While the novel primarily focuses on Irene's feelings of jealousy, Clare is also shown to be envious of Irene. Unlike Irene, however, Clare exhibits jealousy towards Irene's lifestyle. Clare perceives Irene as being close to her blackness and her community, a state that Clare has previously chosen to leave behind but strives to experience again. As Clare and Irene converse during Clare's first visit to Irene's home, Clare expresses her loneliness to Irene, contrasting her view of Irene's condition to Clare's own feelings of isolation: \"'How could you know? How could you? You're free. You're happy.'\" Clare expresses her own jealousy outwardly, even as the novel centers on Irene's inner turmoil."}
{"text":"Scholars such as Andrew W. Davis and Zahirah Sabir acknowledge Irene's psychology of safety and security, which likely originated from \"the threat of racism\" surrounding her family. In the novel, Irene states that she places security as the first priority in her life, on top of race and friendship in the novel."}
{"text":"Davis states that the reason that Irene prioritizes security is she wants to protect her children from the social prejudices of the time. In addition, Irene wants Brian, her husband, to stay in New York as a doctor to provide security for her children. When Brian desires to leave for Brazil, Irene is anxious due to the fact that New York is still a white society, and is a familiar to her as an African-American middle-class woman. Clare's presence in Irene's life is a threat to this security. It makes Irene sense the insecurity of her marriage with her husband, Brian. And, it makes her acknowledge the reality of questions of race and class that surround her and her children's life."}
{"text":"Passing, although focuses on the races aspect of the book, the chapters have talked about motherhood where both Irene and Clare are depicted to be mothers. It is interesting as Irene sees her sons, Junior and Theodore, differently than how Clare sees her daughter, Margery."}
{"text":"Irene views her children as her security; she sees them as the reason Brian would stay with her. Their child ties them together and thus would make Brian stay with Irene even if they have a fallout. Irene holds her children dear to her and would do whatever she can for them. Irene is also the more protective parent compared to Brian; she wants to shield the children from the bad things in the world, like the knowledge of lynching and racism. Irene wants what's best for her children even if it means acting like specific topics do not affect them although they do, like racism."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, Clare views motherhood as a requirement in her lifetime. She had Margery and no longer wants any more children as she cannot handle the suspense of knowing another babies' skin tone. She also mentions how \"children aren't everything\" this shows how she prioritizes her priorities, we see circumstances where she would leave her daughter with her husband and instead socialize with the black community."}
{"text":"Unlike Irene, Clare actually rejects the thought of motherhood in fear that her identity might be revealed. Irene, on the other hand, is the devoted mother wanting the best for her boys, and always talking and thinking about them. Clare does not have the same attachments to Margery like Irene have to Junior and Ted as Clare sees motherhood as a binding thing that forces her to stay in a marriage she feels trapped in, while Irene is in the same boat Irene like this and uses it for her security."}
{"text":"\"Passing\" was published in April 1929 by Knopf in New York City. Sales of the book were modest: Knopf produced three small print runs each under 2,000 copies. While early reviews were primarily positive, it received little attention beyond New York City."}
{"text":"Comparing it to Larsen's previous novel \"Quicksand\", Alice Dunbar-Nelson's review in \"The Washington Eagle\" began by declaring that \"Nella Larsen delights again with her new novel\". Writer and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois hailed it as the \"one of the finest novels of the year\" and believed that its limited success was due to its treating a \"forbidden subject,\" the marriage of a white man to a mixed-race girl who did not reveal her ancestry."}
{"text":"A common criticism of the novel is that it ends too suddenly, without a full exploration of the issues it raises. Mary Rennels, writing in the \"New York Telegram\", said, \"Larsen didn't solve the problem [of passing]. Knocking a character out of a scene doesn't settle a matter.\" An anonymous reviewer for the \"New York Times Book Review\" similarly concluded that \"the most serious fault with the book is its sudden and utterly unconvincing close\", but otherwise considered it an effective treatment of the topic. On the other hand, Dunbar-Nelson found that the ending confirmed to the reader that \"you have been reading a masterpiece all along.\""}
{"text":"The novel was adapted to film by director Rebecca Hall in 2021. It had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 30, 2021, and will be released by Netflix later in the year."}
{"text":"Black Enterprise stated that movement \"sparked initiatives of female empowerment.\" It was created in response to violence toward women of color by United States police and is a part of the larger movement Black Twitter."}
{"text":"The Black women syllabus is part of a larger effort by scholars to make widely available information often missing in higher education. The best-known example of this is Melissa Harris-Perry's Black Feminism Syllabus. Similar to other hashtag campaigns on Twitter, such as the #FergusonSyllabus, #SayHerNameSyllabus, and #CharlestonSyllabus, #blackwomensyllabus is a crowd-sourced list of reading recommendations by Twitter users, specifically focused on articles, essays, and books about women of color."}
{"text":"Though the incident in Texas with Charnesia Corley was the stated impetus for the #blackwomensyllabus campaign, other instances of police brutally against women have added to the momentum toward this Twitter movement, such as the death of Sandra Bland, found dead in a jail cell also in Texas, on July 13, 2015, after being pulled over by a white police officer for a traffic violation."}
{"text":"Joanna Banks is an American book collector. In 2018 Banks donated her collection of African American literature to Penn Libraries. The collection comprises over 10,000 books by African American authors, primarily published from the 1970s onwards, with particular strengths in women's writing, children's literature, cookery books, and African American periodicals."}
{"text":"The Talented Tenth is a term that designated a leadership class of African descendant Americans in the early 20th century. The term was created by White Northern philanthropists, then publicized by W. E. B. Du Bois in an influential essay of the same name, which he published in September 1903. It appeared in \"The Negro Problem\", a collection of essays written by leading African Americans."}
{"text":"The phrase \"talented tenth\" originated in 1896 among White Northern liberals, specifically the American Baptist Home Mission Society, a Christian missionary society strongly supported by John D. Rockefeller. They had the goal of establishing Black colleges in the South to train Black teachers and elites. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote \"The Talented Tenth;\" Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States and industrialization was skyrocketing. Du Bois thought it a good time for African Americans to advance their positions in society."}
{"text":"The \"Talented Tenth\" refers to the one in ten Black men that have cultivated the ability to become leaders of the Black community by acquiring a college education, writing books, and becoming directly involved in social change. In \"The Talented Tenth,\" Du Bois argues that these college educated African American men should sacrifice their personal interests and use their education to lead and better the Black community."}
{"text":"He strongly believed that the Black community needed a classical education to reach their full potential, rather than the industrial education promoted by the Atlanta compromise, endorsed by Booker T. Washington and some white philanthropists. He saw classical education as the pathway to bettering the Black community and as a basis for what, in the 20th century, would be known as public intellectuals:"}
{"text":"In his later life, Du Bois came to believe that leadership could arise on many levels, and grassroots efforts were also important to social change. His stepson David Du Bois tried to publicize those views, writing in 1972: \"Dr. Du Bois' conviction that it's those who suffered most and have the least to lose that we should look to for our steadfast, dependable and uncompromising leadership.\""}
{"text":"Du Bois writes in his \"Talented Tenth\" essay that"}
{"text":"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst."}
{"text":"Later in \"Dusk of Dawn,\" a collection of his writings, Du Bois redefines this notion, acknowledging contributions by other men. He writes that \"my own panacea of an earlier day was a flight of class from mass through the development of the Talented Tenth; but the power of this aristocracy of talent was to lie in its knowledge and character, not in its wealth.\""}
{"text":"As stated previously, W.E.B. Du Bois believed that college educated African Americans should set their personal interests aside and use their education to better their communities. Using education to better the African American community meant many things for Du Bois. For one, he believed that the \"Talented Tenth\" should seek to acquire elite roles in politics. By doing do, Black communities could have representation in government. Representation in government would allow these college educated African Americans to take \"racial action.\""}
{"text":"That is, Du Bois believed that segregation was a problem that needed to be dealt with, and having African Americans in politics would start the process of dealing with that problem. Moving on, he also believed that an education would allow one to pursue business endeavors that would better the economic welfare of Black communities. According to Du Bois, success in business would not only better the economic welfare of Black communities, it would also encourage White people to see Black people as more equal to them, and thus encourage integration and allow African Americans to enter the mainstream business world."}
{"text":"In 1948, W.E.B. Du Bois revised his \"Talented Tenth\" thesis into the \"Guiding Hundredth.\" This revision was an attempt to democratize the thesis by forming alliances and friendships with other minority groups that also sought to better their conditions in society. Whereas the \"Talented Tenth\" only pointed out problems African Americans were facing in their communities, the \"Guiding Hundredth\" would be open to mending the problems other minority groups were encountering as well. Moreover, Du Bois revised this theory to stress the importance of morality. He wanted the people leading these communities to have values synonymous with altruism and selflessness. Thus, when it came to who would be leading these communities, Du Bois placed morality above education."}
{"text":"Du Bois emphasized forming alliances with other minority groups because it helped promote equality among all blacks. Both \"The Talented Tenth\" and \"The Guiding Hundredth\" exhibit the idea that a plan to for political action would need to be evident in order to continue to speak to large populations of black people. Because to Du Bois, black people's ability to express themselves in politics was the epitome of black cultural expression. To gain emancipation was to separate black and white. The cultures could not combine as a way to avoid and protect the spirit of \"the universal black.\""}
{"text":"The idea of the \"Talented Tenth\" is received both positively and negatively. Positively, some argue that current generations of college educated African Americans are abiding by Du Bois' prescriptions and sacrificing their personal interests to lead and better their communities. This, in turn, leads to an \"uplift\" of those in the Black community. Negatively, some argue that current generations of college educated African Americans should not be abiding by Du Bois' prescriptions, and should indeed be pursuing their own personal interests. That is, they believe that college educated African Americans are not responsible for bettering their communities whereas Du Bois thinks that they are."}
{"text":"As stated previously, to be a part of this \"Talented Tenth,\" an African American must be college educated. This is a qualification that many view as unattainable for many members of the African American community because the percentage of African Americans in college is much lower than the percentage of White people in college. There are multiple explanations for this fact."}
{"text":"Some argue that this disparity is the result of government policies. For instance, financial aid for college students in low income families decreased in the 1980s because problems regarding monetary inequality began to be perceived as problems of the past. A lack of financial aid can deter or disable one from pursuing higher education. Thus, since Black and African American families make up about 2.9 million of the low income families in the U.S., members of the Black community surely encounter this problem."}
{"text":"Moreover, because African Americans make up such a large number of the low income families in the U.S., many African Americans face the problem of their children being placed in poorly funded public schools. Because poor funding often leads to poor education, getting into college will be more difficult for students. Along with a poor education, these schools often lack resources that can prepare students for college. For instance, schools with poor funding do not have college guidance counselors: a resource that many private and well funded public schools have."}
{"text":"Therefore, some argue that Du Bois' prescription or plan for this \"Talented Tenth\" are unattainable."}
{"text":"Dark Matter is an anthology series of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories and essays produced by people of African descent. The editor of the series is Sheree Thomas. The first book in the series, \"Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora\" (2000), won the 2001 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The second book in the Dark Matter series, \"Dark Matter: Reading the Bones\" (2004), won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 2005. A forthcoming third book in the series is tentatively named \"Dark Matter: Africa Rising\"."}
{"text":"That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir is a 2008 memoir by Stacey Patton."}
{"text":"The book was published by Simon & Schuster."}
{"text":"A coming-of-age memoir about a young African American woman surviving the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist."}
{"text":"Black lesbian literature in the United States"}
{"text":"Black lesbian literature is a subgenre of lesbian literature and African American literature that focuses on the experiences of black women who identify as lesbians. The genre features poetry and fiction about black lesbian characters as well as non-fiction essays which address issues faced by black lesbians. Prominent figures within the genre include Ann Allen Shockley, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, and Barbara Smith."}
{"text":"Black lesbian literature is characterized by its central focus on black women's experiences as they are shaped by interlocking systems of oppression like racism, sexism, homophobia, and class discrimination."}
{"text":"Black lesbian literature emerged out of the Black Feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dissatisfied with the inability of both the feminist movement of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement to address the specific forms of oppression experienced by black women, these writers produced critical essays and fictional works which gave voice to their experiences, using Black Feminist theories like intersectionality as tools to carry out their analysis. Through this critical analysis, black lesbian writers and activists were able to use the genre to make necessary interventions in the normative ideologies regarding race, gender, and sexuality which emerged from these larger political movements."}
{"text":"More specifically, the genre allowed black lesbians to examine the homophobia that they encountered in nearly all of their political and community circles. Writer and activist Cheryl Clarke wrote essays like \"The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community\" and \"Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance\" which both explore the way that white male patriarchy and white supremacy create the gendered and racialized forms of homophobia that black lesbians experience."}
{"text":"In 1977 the self-proclaimed activist group of black feminists and lesbians known as The Combahee River Collective published a statement in which they outlined their main political objectives to fight racism, sexism, homophobia, and class oppression simultaneously. Although many prominent activists were involved in the conception of the statement, the piece was drafted and finalized by Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith. Within the statement the group declared its rejection of Lesbian separatism, deeming it ineffective as a political strategy because it excludes others, namely progressive black men, from joining their cause."}
{"text":"One of the foundational texts of the genre is Ann Allen Shockley's novel, \"Loving Her\". Published in 1974, \"Loving Her\" is widely regarded as the first novel to feature a black lesbian protagonist. The book follows the story of Renay, a black woman who leaves her abusive marriage to a black man to enter a relationship with a white lesbian named Terry. \"Loving Her\" is considered groundbreaking for its explicit portrayal of lesbian sexuality and it paved the way for black women writers to depict lesbian relationships in their writing."}
{"text":"Shockley followed the publication of \"Loving Her\" with two more books, \"The Black and White of It\", a collection of short stories featuring various black lesbian protagonists, which was the first of its kind, and another novel, \"Say Jesus and Come to Me\". Other works began to arrive in the early 1980s which featured black lesbian protagonists like Alice Walker's novel \"The Color Purple\" and Audre Lorde's autobiography \".\" While both novels explored the development of their characters' sexuality, they also examined the characters' experiences as black women in a sexist and white supremacist society."}
{"text":"Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York."}
{"text":"Cave Canem programs include an annual summer retreat, regional workshops, first- and second-book poetry prizes, anthology publication and national readings and panels. The organization has also published two anthologies, \"Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem\u2019s First Decade\", edited by Derricotte and Eady (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and \"The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South\", edited by Nikky Finney (University of Georgia Press, 2007)."}
{"text":"In September 2016, National Book Foundation awarded Cave Canem the Literarian Award for service to the American literary community."}
{"text":"Writing for \"The New York Times\" in 2015, Stephen Burt described Cave Canem as \"a major incubator for the current renaissance in black poetry, which includes the poets Tracy K. Smith, who won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry; Afaa Michael Weaver, who won the Kingsley Tufts prize last year; and, most recently, Claudia Rankine, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry this year.\""}
{"text":"Currently held annually at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Cave Canem\u2019s tuition-free retreat is a week of faculty-led writing workshops and poetry readings for African-American poets. Accepted applicants (fellows) may participate for a maximum of three summers within a five-year period. Past faculty have included Presidential Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander; Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa; National Book Award finalists Patricia Smith and Carl Phillips and 2011 National Book Award winner Nikky Finney."}
{"text":"Cave Canem Foundation sponsors two annual book prizes. One is the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, awarded for an exceptional first book by an African-American poet and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press; Natasha Trethewey won the inaugural prize in 1999 for her collection \"Domestic Work\". Other winners have included Van Clief-Stefanon (2001) and Donika Kelly (2011) for her book, \"Bestiary\"."}
{"text":"The second is the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, a second-book award established in 2009 that \"celebrates and publishes works of lasting cultural value and literary excellence\" by African-American poets. It is awarded every other year."}
{"text":"Established in 2001, these moderated discussions feature poets and scholars who \"have played historic roles in African-American poetry.\" Participants have included Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove, and poet and activist Amiri Baraka."}
{"text":"Launched in 2008, Poets on Craft features \u201caward-winning poets in the early-to-middle stages of their careers. Poets meet in moderated conversation, discussing aesthetics, the role of the contemporary poet and other topical issues.\u201d Participants have included National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Major Jackson and Walt Whitman Award winner Suji Kwock Kim."}
{"text":"Established in 1999, workshops for emerging poets of color are held semi-annually in New York City and, more recently, in Columbia, South Carolina, in partnership with the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Instructors have included former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, Marilyn Nelson, Whiting Writers' Award winner Tyehimba Jess, and American Book Award winner, Kimiko Hahn."}
{"text":"In 2016, Cave Canem became the first organization (rather than individual) to win the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for service to the American literary community. The National Book Foundation's executive director Lisa Lucas said: \"Cave Canem\u2019s innovative and effective literary activism has been transformative to the world of letters. Their ongoing commitment to provide supportive channels for African American poets to thrive has yielded works that enrich the world\u2019s literary culture.\""}
{"text":"A Brighter Coming Day is a compilation of works by Frances Harper, written between 1853 and 1911."}
{"text":"It is edited and introduced by contemporary literary scholar Frances Smith Foster and divides the text into four sections representing different periods of Harper's life and including her letters, poetry, essays, speeches, and short fiction."}
{"text":"When Washington Was in Vogue is a Harlem Renaissance novel written by Edward Christopher Williams, set in Washington, D.C. in 1922-3. The first epistolary novel written by an African-American, it was originally serialized in the radical magazine \"The Messenger\" between January 1925 and July 1926 as \"The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair.\" Largely due to the small circulation of the magazine, \"When Washington Was in Vogue\" languished in obscurity until its rediscovery and subsequent publication in 2003. It follows the adventures of Davy Carr, a scholar living amongst the black socialites of the Roaring Twenties."}
{"text":"Additionally, the novel offers an analysis of 1920s society from the viewpoint of a conservative narrator. Davy, while educated and possessing a well-tuned aesthetic sense, is unquestionably the product of an earlier time. His and Caroline's early interest in each other stems from this difference, as her radical modernity and his stolid traditionalism render them mutually fascinating."}
{"text":"\"When Washington Was in Vogue\" was serialized in \"The Messenger\" as \"The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair.\" Editors A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and George Schuyler gave no indication of the novel's authorship. Adam McKible identified the literary and historical merit of the novel while researching his dissertation, and followed the trail of authorship to Edward Christopher Williams, the head librarian at Howard University from 1916 to 1929. With McKible's editorial oversight, the collection was published as a whole novel in 2003 by HarperCollins. As almost certainly the first epistolary novel written by an African-American, \"When Washington Was in Vogue\" establishes Williams as a Harlem Renaissance writer, and as an innovator in the African American literary canon."}
{"text":"Critical response to When Washington Was in Vogue was generally favorable. While some reviewers, such as \"Kirkus Reviews\", called the book \"of academic interest only\" due to its formulaic plotlines, others saw Williams's analysis of intra-racial social politics as a fascinating window into the period. \"Publishers Weekly\" heralded it as \"an invaluable addition to period scholarship\", while a laudatory review in \"The Crisis\" said the novel was \"a welcome and consistently entertaining glimpse of a pivotal era\". With Christina Moore's 2013 \"Traditional Rebirth: The Epistolary Genre in When Washington Was in Vogue,\" published in \"African American Review\", the novel (as a published whole) received its first scholarly treatment outside of McKible's own work."}
{"text":"Black Panther: World of Wakanda is a comic book series and a spin-off from the Marvel Comics' \"Black Panther\" title. It published six issues before being canceled. The series was primarily written by Roxane Gay, with poet Yona Harvey contributing a story to the first issue. Alitha E. Martinez drew the majority of the art for the series, for which Afua Richardson contributed cover art to the first five issues, as well as art for a short story in the first issue. Gay and Harvey became the first two black women to author a series for Marvel; counting Martinez and Richardson, upon its debut the series itself was helmed entirely by black women. Ta-Nehisi Coates served as a consultant for the series."}
{"text":"\"Black Panther: World of Wakanda\" won a 2018 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series. The series also won a 2018 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comic Book."}
{"text":"After the success of the \"Black Panther\" series relaunch in April 2016, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marvel developed a companion piece set in the fictional African country of Wakanda, home to the Black Panther. Coates recommended Gay and Harvey to pen the series. He had seen Gay read a short story about zombies two years earlier that he recalled as \"the most surprising, unexpected, coolest zombie story you ever want to see\"; Harvey had been his classmate at Howard University and he felt her skills as a poet would lend themselves to the comic-book form, telling \"The New York Times\", \"That\u2019s just so little space, and you have to speak with so much power. I thought she\u2019d be a natural.\""}
{"text":"The series debuted November 9, 2016 (with a cover date of January 2017). Harvey wrote a 10-page origin story for Wakanda's revolutionary leader Zenzi, and has said she drew on the example of Winnie Mandela as inspiration. Gay has mentioned the character of Olivia Pope in the first season of \"Scandal\" and the original USA version of \"La Femme Nikita\" as influences for the series."}
{"text":"The series was canceled after six issues due to poor sales."}
{"text":"The first \"World of Wakanda\" story arc (issues #1-5) features Ayo and Aneka, two Wakandan members of the Dora Milaje, the Black Panther's female security force. Ayo and Aneka are also lovers. The first storyline also describes Zenzi, a revolutionary and villain in the \"Black Panther\" series."}
{"text":"The series' final issue, #6, is a standalone story by Rembert Browne and Joe Bennett about Kasper Cole and White Tiger."}
{"text":"The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family is a 2004 photographic poetic narrative by Ntozake Shange and the photography collective Kamoinge Inc. The Kamoinge Workshop was founded in New York in 1963 to support the work of black photographers in a field then dominated by white photographers. The book was first published on October 26, 2004, through Atria Books and was edited by Frank Steward, the president of Kamoinge Inc."}
{"text":"The book depicts the various aspects of everyday urban African-American life through poetic narrative. Through poetic narrative and accompanying photographs, the book deals with various themes such as religion, identity, and representation."}
{"text":"Critical reception for \"The Sweet Breath of Life\" has been positive and reviewers have compared the work to that of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava."}
{"text":"\"Black Issues Book Review\" judges some of the photos to be outdated and that some of the poems felt more like journalism than poetry, but also that when the poems and photography worked together they were \"powerfully made\" and \"breathtaking\". \"Curve\" rated the book highly, citing the photography as one of the book's highlights. The \"Tri-State Defender\" praised the project as \"a wonderful blend of words and images that give definition to the beauty and wonder of contemporary African-American culture.\""}
{"text":"Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston is a 1992 book edited by Howard Beeth and Cary D. Wintz and published by Texas A&M University Press. It is a collection of thirteen essays about the history of African-Americans in Houston. It was the first scholarly book to provide a comprehensive history of Houston's black community, and the book's dust jacket referred to it as the first such book of any city in the Southern United States."}
{"text":"The two editors were members of the Texas Southern University history department."}
{"text":"The book is divided into four sections, with the introduction being the first section and the others containing essays; the three essay sections are organized by theme."}
{"text":"There are a total of thirteen essays, which cover the 19th century and 20th century. They were not written specifically to be included in the book. Most of the essays were previously unpublished; while four were reprinted from academic journals, with three from the \"Houston Review\" of the Houston Public Library Houston Metropolitan Research Center; and two were primary sources. In total, two primary sources and seven articles were first published in this book. Of the essays not made by first-hand observers, eight were written by historians and three were written by sociologists. Howard Beeth wrote the opening section, and the editors provide introductions and commentary in the other sections."}
{"text":"The commentaries in the introductions of each article address social history, religion, and fraternal organizations, things not discussed in the essays themselves. Joseph A. Tomberlin of the \"Mississippi Quarterly\" wrote that \"Linking the sections through the introductions gives the volume greater unity than one might expect in such a collaborative enterprise.\""}
{"text":"Beeth's opening section, \"Historians, Houston, and History,\" discusses the state of scholarship in the newly-emerging field of urban studies; he stated that academics previously had biases against urban history and local history, there were very few such studies in previous eras, and there had been a lack of preservation of sources prior to the 1970s. In addition Houston's post-secondary institutions had not yet fully developed, and he added that there had previously been a lack of interest in the history of Houston, but research interest in local history began to increase at area universities and Houston's changing character also attracted interest in its history."}
{"text":"The first collection of essays focuses on the 19th century."}
{"text":"Tamara Myner Haygood in \"Use and Distribution of Slave Labor in Harris County, Texas, 1836\u201360\" described the role of slaves in Houston as well as surrounding parts of Harris County. Haygood argued that slavery was important in developing Harris County as the economic patterns established during slavery continued to exist."}
{"text":"Barry A. Crouch in \"Seeking Equality: Houston Black Women during Reconstruction\" describes the role of women in trying to gain civil rights during the Reconstruction Era; much of the research originated from the archives of the Freedmen's Bureau."}
{"text":"\"Richard Allen: The Chequered Career of Houston's First Black State Legislator\" by Merline Pitre was originally printed in an academic journal. Pitre argued that the origins of the black middle class, which she characterized as \"articulate, talented, and manipulative\", may be explained by studying politicians like Allen. Alwyn Barr of Texas Tech University stated that Pitre described Allen as being \"able but ambitious\". Since Allen never left any personal papers behind, Joseph A. Tomberlin of the \"Mississippi Quarterly\" stated that Pitre had to use \"less satisfactory sources\"; he argued that while the situation was not her fault, the lack of sources related directly to Allen affected the quality of her essay."}
{"text":"The second collection discusses the late 19th Century and early 20th Century."}
{"text":"In \"The Emergence of Black Business in Houston Texas: A Study of Race and Ideology, 1919\u201345,\" James M. SoRelle wrote about African-American businesses and how they, in order to attract black investors and customers, appealed to racial solidarity and pride as well the idea of \"self-help\" within the black community. SoRelle criticized \"Black Bourgeoisie\" by E. Franklin Frazier, which had argued that the black middle class was greedy, since the book had rejected the concept of black leaders needing to respond to Jim Crow and how these leaders were committed to their race too easily. SoRelle also argued that boosterism from African-American organizations became an important part of Houston's \"business progressivism\"."}
{"text":"Frances Dressman, in \"Yes, We Have No Jitneys!': Transportation Issues in Houston's Black Community, 1914\u20131924,\" wrote about the rise and fall of black jitney services, which initially competed with trolley lines until the city government began shutting several of them down; this essay was originally published elsewhere. In particular it discusses the San Felipe Jitney Line."}
{"text":"The other primary source article is \"Houston's Colored Citizens: Activities and Conditions among the Negro Population in the 1920s,\" a 1928 article written by that was published by Clifton F. Richardson in a Houston area publication, the liberal white magazine \"Civics\". Richardson was a NAACP chapter president and the founder of the \"Houston Informer\". This article discusses the elite of the city's black community. John H. Haley of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington stated that it was \"a glowing assessment of black citizens of \"Heavenly Houston,\" using a term employed by people promoting the city."}
{"text":"Taylor characterizes the two primary source articles as \"two of the most impressive entries\". Alwyn Barr of Texas Tech University described the Greene and Richardson sources as \"slightly more optimistic descriptions of business and social leaders and institutions in the period.\""}
{"text":"The final collection discusses 20th century efforts to end discrimination against black people. SoRelle discusses the discrimination in public schools, accommodations, transportation, and other publicly-used facilities; as well as police and Ku Klux Klan-related violence, between World War I and World War II, arguing that conditions were more severe than, in the words of Barr, \"Houston's popular image of the period suggested.\""}
{"text":"Robert V. Haynes, in \"Black Houstonians and the White Democratic Primary, 1920\u201345,\" described the effort to end an all-white primary in the Democratic Party in the period 1920\u20131940, which culminated in \"Smith v. Allwright\" and the disestablishment of the said primary; this essay was originally published elsewhere."}
{"text":"F. Kenneth Jensen wrote about 1960 and 1961 sit-ins by Houston students, from Texas Southern University, at lunch counters at a Weingartens shop. According to Jensen, this resulted in the end of several discriminatory practices. Jensen argued that the urbanization of blacks augmented their resistance against discriminatory laws. Haley describes the conclusion as \"somewhat doubtful\"."}
{"text":"Cecile E. Harrison and Alice K. Lain's piece discusses the rise and fall of Operation Breadbasket from 1966 through 1974."}
{"text":"Robert A. Bullard wrote about contemporary issues facing black people in the working class, stating that housing difficulties were occurring with low and moderate income individuals; at the time the conditions of housing of many blacks were poor, and most blacks lived in black neighborhoods. Bullard had previously published his own book and this essay is a further explanation of his previous point."}
{"text":"The final chapter was written by Robert Fisher, who documented the city government's resistance against government programs and the effects of privatization; the author believes that many of the city's problems resulted from excess privatization. Haley stated that Fisher perceived as Houston \"as the epitome of the privatized city\". Hirsch stated that the chapter has \"some theoretical applications\"."}
{"text":"The book won the September 1993 Ottis Lock Award for the Best Book on East Texas History."}
{"text":"Barr wrote that the book \"is a valuable contribution that adds diversity to a general sense of the African- American and southern urban experience\" and that \"the chapters generally reflect sound research and thoughtful analysis\" even though \"some conclusions may stir debate\"."}
{"text":"Bolton wrote that the book \"is an excellent example of African-American history, of urban history, and of collaborative effort.\""}
{"text":"Haley argued that the book demonstrated that \"the black experience in Houston was quite similar to that in other places in the South\"; he criticized how the book primarily used the viewpoint of elites, documented \"only facets of the black experiences\", and neglected the \"experience of the black masses\". He believed the introductions and essays \"are imbalanced and often too narrowly focused.\" In addition he stated the book \"hardly touched upon\" the issue of African-American and Hispanic and Latino relations."}
{"text":"Hirsch concluded that while the book is \"a helpful initial reconnaissance\" that has \"interesting bits of information and insights scattered throughout\", the book does not provide any comparisons nor does it give \"a clear overall conception\" of the black community in Houston, and therefore there is still \"the need for a broader, deeper, and more focused treatment.\""}
{"text":"Marchiafava concluded that even though it \"is not intended to be the final word on African Americans in Houston, the book is a major contribution for its effort to fill in a major gap in the city's history.\""}
{"text":"Taylor praised several of the articles, saying that the ones about Slavery and the post-U.S. Civil War Reconstruction Era \"are among the strongest in the book\". Taylor argued that while the book did discuss failed attempts to establish a black elite in Houston, the book had not covered adequate ground on describing relations between blacks and Hispanics and Latinos, the roles of socio-civic groups such as the NAACP, churches, fraternal orders, nor the overall economic structure of black Houston."}
{"text":"Wooster wrote that the book has \"well written\" essays that are \"based upon solid research in primary and secondary materials\" and that the book \"is a major contribution to our understanding of urban black culture in the South.\" He argued the book should have included ethnic composition maps and a chapter about the last quarter of the 19th century."}
{"text":"The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess is a humor book released on June 21, 2001. The book was written by Kalyn Johnson, Tracey Lewis, Karla Lightfoot, and Ginger Wilson, and published by Broadway Books."}
{"text":"It is described by one of its writers as a humor book, written in a tongue-in-cheek manner."}
{"text":"The American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) was an organization of African-American writers, artists, and scholars. The society was founded as a result of the Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in 1956 based on the idea of the French \"\". In June 1957, the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) was officially founded by five African-American intellectuals. During its heyday in the early 1960s, AMSAC had around four hundred members. One of the main goals of the organisation was to expose African Americans to their African heritage. This aim was pursued through organising exhibitions, lectures, music performances, and conferences in the United States (primarily New York) and Africa (occasionally)."}
{"text":"In 1961, AMSAC opened an African office in Lagos, Nigeria. The opening was celebrated with a two-day festival of music performances, dancing, panel discussions, and art exhibited by Africans and African Americans on December 1961."}
{"text":"AMSAC had received federal tax exemption the year prior and thus large grants became available to the organization for specific projects from various entities. This financial backing was how they were able to organize the large festival in Lagos. The grants were later revealed as CIA pass-throughs."}
{"text":"After 1967, AMSAC's membership sharply declined after it was named as one of the organizations that was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)."}
{"text":"The Justice Trilogy, also called the Justice Cycle, was a series of young-adult science-fiction books written by Virginia Hamilton. Considered philosophically significant by critics within the field of young adult literature, the series is also notable as one of the first young-adult science fiction novels by a significant African American author."}
{"text":"The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. \"The Negro Renaissance\" included Locke's title essay \"The New Negro,\" as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond."}
{"text":"\"The New Negro: An Interpretation\" dives into how the African Americans sought social, political, and artistic change. Instead of accepting their position in society, Locke saw the new negro as championing and demanding civil rights. In addition, his anthology sought to change old stereotypes and replaced them with new visions of black identity that resisted simplification. The essays and poems in the anthology mirror real life events and experiences."}
{"text":"The anthology reflects the voice of middle class African American citizens that wanted to have equal civil rights like the white, middle class counterparts. However, some writers, such as Langston Hughes, sought to give voice to the lower, working class."}
{"text":"Part 1 contains Alain Locke's title essay \"the New Negro\" as well as the fiction and poetry sections. One of the poems, \u201cWhite Houses,\u201d represents the African American's struggle to confront and challenge the White House and white America, in order to fight for civil rights. It shows a figure being shut out and left on the street to fend for himself. This is a figure who is not allowed the glory of the inside world, which represents the American ideals of freedom and opportunity."}
{"text":"Part 2: The New Negro in a New World."}
{"text":"\"The New Negro in a New World\" includes social and political analysis by writers including W. E. B. Du Bois, historian E. Franklin Frazier, Melville J. Herskovits, James Weldon Johnson, Paul U. Kellogg, Elise Johnson McDougald, Kelly Miller, Robert R. Moton, and activist Walter Francis White."}
{"text":"The book contains several portraits by Winold Reiss and illustrations by Aaron Douglas. It was published by Albert and Charles Boni, New York, in 1925."}
{"text":"Alain Locke commonly draws on the theme of the \"Old\" vs. the \"New Negro\". The Old Negro according to Locke was a \u201ccreature of moral debate and historical controversy\u201d. The Old Negro was restricted by the inhumane conditions of slavery that he was forced to live in; historically traumatized due to events forced upon them and the social perspective of them as a whole. The Old Negro was something to be pushed and moved around and told what to do and worried about. The Old Negro was a product of stereotypes and judgments that were put on them, not ones that they created. They were forced to live in a shadow of themselves and others' actions."}
{"text":"Some of the most prominent African American artist that were greatly influenced by the \u201cNew Negro\u201d concept that reflected in their music and concert works were William Grant Still and Duke Ellington. Duke Ellington, a renowned jazz artist, began to reflect the \"New Negro\" in his music, particularly in the jazz suite \"Black, Brown, and Beige\". The Harlem Renaissance prompted a renewed interest in black culture that was even reflected in the work of white artists, the most well known example being George Gershwin's \"Porgy and Bess\"."}
{"text":"Locke\u2019s legacy sparks a reoccurring interest in examining African culture and art. Not only was Locke's philosophy important during the Harlem Renaissance period, but continuing today, researchers and academia continue to analyze Locke's work. Locke\u2019s anthology \"The New Negro: An Interpretation\" has endured years of reprinting spanning from 1925 until 2015. Locke\u2019s anthology has been reprinted in book form nearly thirty-five times since its original publication in 1925. \u00a0Locke\u2019s original anthology was published in 1925 by New York publisher Albert and Charles Boni.\u00a0 The most recent reprint was published by Mansfield Center CT: Martino Publishing, 2015."}
{"text":"Beyond Locke\u2019s work being reprinted, Locke\u2019s influences extend to other authors and academics interested in Locke\u2019s views and philosophy of African culture and art.\u00a0 Author Anna Pochmara wrote \"The Making of the New Negro.\" Journal articles by Leonard Harris, \"Alain Locke and Community\" and \"Identity: Alain Locke\u2019s Atavism\".\u00a0 Essays by John C. Charles \"What was Africa to him? : Alain Locke\" in the book \"New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance.\""}
{"text":"Locke\u2019s influence on the Harlem Renaissance encouraged artists and writers like Zora Neale Hurston to seek inspiration from Africa.\u00a0 Artists Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Horace Pippin created artwork representing the \u201cNew Negro Movement\u201d influenced by Locke\u2019s anthology."}
{"text":"Flyy Girl is young adult\/new adult literature and an urban fiction book written by Omar Tyree. The book was originally published by Mars Productions in 1993 and republished by Simon & Schuster for adults in 1996. The novel is regarded to be the genesis of the modern urban-fiction\/street-lit movement that would later gain momentum in 1999 with the publication of Sister Souljah's \"The Coldest Winter Ever\"."}
{"text":"Flyy Girl is African-American coming-of-age story that follows Tracy Ellison from her sixth-birthday party in 1977 to her 17th birthday. Tracy grows up in the middle-class Philadelphia suburb of Germantown. The daughter of a dietitian and pharmacist, Tracy is beautiful, intelligent, and armed with self-esteem and a sassy mouth. Tracy is also boy crazy, which leads to sex in the indulgent, hip-hop 1980s and the effects of the cocaine economy flourishing in black communities."}
{"text":"Tyree wrote two sequels to \"Flyy Girl\": \"For the Love of Money\" (2001) and \"Boss Lady\" (2006). Both were published by Simon & Schuster."}
{"text":"In July 2013, Lionsgate Entertainment's CodeBlack Films had acquired the rights to \"Flyy Girl\" with hopes of transforming the novel into a feature film. In February 2015, CodeBlack Films announced that \"Dear White People\" producer Effie Brown was hired to produce a film adaptation of the novel. Brown and her company, Duly Noted Inc., will oversee the film's development alongside Codeblack Films' Jeff Clanagan and Quincy Newell."}
{"text":"On June 17, 2015, it was announced that Sanaa Lathan would star in and executive produce the film adaptation of Omar Tyree's trilogy that starts with \"Flyy Girl\". Lathan will portray Tracy Ellison, a successful businesswoman and workaholic who believes that money is always the key to happiness. Geoffrey S. Fletcher was hired to write the script."}
{"text":"A Dialogue is a 1973 collaborative work featuring a multi-topic conversation between writers James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. The preface was written by Ida Lewis, the afterword by Orde M. Coombs. It was published by J. B. Lippincott & Co."}
{"text":"This collection explores an array of themes connected to Black American life. Many of the included works contain elements of social criticism and messages of anti-racism. All but one were written in the early 1970s a \"a socially and politically dynamic moment in the nation's history and a renaissance decade for black theater.\""}
{"text":"The collection was met with mixed review, primarily in the realm of critical scholarship."}
{"text":"The Voice of the Negro was a literary periodical aimed at a national audience of African Americans which was published from 1904 to 1907. It was created in Atlanta, Georgia in June 1904 by Austin N. Jenkins, the white manager of the publishing company J. L. Nichols and Company. He gave full control of the magazine to the Black editors John W. E. Bowen, Sr. and Jesse Max Barber."}
{"text":"It relocated to Chicago following the Atlanta Race Riot of September 1906, and ceased publication in 1907."}
{"text":"The periodical published writing by Booker T. Washington, as well as work by a younger generation of Black activists and intellectuals: W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope, Kelly Miller, Mary Church Terrell, and William Pickens. It featured poetry by James D. Corrothers, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar."}
{"text":"\"The Voice of the Negro\" was the first African-American periodical based in the South. It was originally published in Atlanta in 1904, and created by Austin N. Jenkins, the white manager of the publishing company J. L. Nichols and Company. However, he left complete control and responsibility over the magazine to the Black editors John W. E. Bowen, Sr. and Jesse Max Barber. Barber and Bowen aimed for the magazine to include \"current and sociological history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.\" At this time, Atlanta had the most Black institutes, so the editors also strove to uplift the Black literary and political voice there."}
{"text":"Through the articles and editorials, \"The Voice of the Negro\" emerged as a vocal political magazine during the early 1900s. The magazine's role as a \"political advocate in national and local politics\" has content that consists of local and national political figures and how black and white people saw the quality of their work. The \"important\" people within these discussions were W.E.B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt. However, the person with the most significant role in presenting the political movements and political commentary was Booker T. Washington. He became the \"spokesman and leader\" of the Black race with his Atlanta Exposition in 1895."}
{"text":"\"The Voice of the Negro\" inspired black intellectuals across the nation and allowed Du Bois to start his political movement, the Niagara movement, in 1905. Which was made of \"educated and elite blacks\" and promoted political and social equality. The organization also created local organizations in seventeen of thirty states where the magazine was sold. Throughout the journal productions, there was periodical controversy where some of the presented language was not acceptable. Specifically, the words were \"Leopard Spots\" and \"Clansman.\""}
{"text":"Though during Roosevelt's presidency, \"The Voice of the Negro\" criticized his role in the change of his racial policy and called his failures to call Congress's attention to open the nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The black community also became outraged with Roosevelt's lack of action in the Brownsville, Texas incident where one citizen was killed and two wounded during a violent riot by white citizens."}
{"text":"\"The Voice of the Negro\" became the black population's voice and reflected the anger and outrage of the black population."}
{"text":"There was a lot of racial violence occurring in Georgia in the beginning of the 20th century, but the event that impacted the magazine the most was the Atlanta Massacre of 1906. One of the main editors, Jesse Max Barber, was enraged at the speculations that the riot was caused by Atlanta's Black population, so he anonymously wrote in the New York World that the white press was to blame. His authorship was discovered eventually by white leaders and he was threatened with arrest. To avoid arrest, Barber fled to Chicago and continued publication under the shortened name \"The Voice.\" However, after relocating, \"the subsequent financial instability, coupled with increasing pressure from Tuskegee, compelled Barber to cease production, reluctantly, in October 1907.\""}
{"text":"The first volume of \"The Voice of the Negro,\" was published January 1904. Their goal was to keep the American people updated on the current history, educational improvements, art, science, race issues, sociological movements and religion. The price to subscribe to the issues were $1.00 per year."}
{"text":"Volume one was released in 12 different issues containing events that happened in that particular month. Each of these issues had different editors and contributors which made the content different in every issue."}
{"text":"Volume One No.1 had major contributors like Prof. William Scarborough, Prof. John Hope, Prof. Kelly Miller, Mr. S. A. Beadle and Prof. Silas X. Floyd. All these authors also contributed a short excerpts and poems, an example is S. A. Beadle's short story \"If I Had a Million\"."}
{"text":"Volume One No. 2 had the same contributors as No.1 but introduced newer content from Kelly Miller, Jno. H. Adams Jr, J. Max Barber, W. G. Carver, Benjamin Brawley, H. M. Porter, L. A. J. Moorer, D. Webster Davis, and Silas X. Floyd."}
{"text":"The second volume of \"The Voice of the Negro\", was published in January 1905. This volume is split up into different numbers going all the way to Number 12. This is released on a monthly basis and is shown next to the title of the Journal."}
{"text":"The credited editors on this Volume Two No. 1 are Benjamin Brawley, Corporal Simmons, Mary Terrell, Bishop Warren Candler, Rev. Dr. Bradley, William Ward, W. E. B. DuBois, Kelly Miller, W.H. Council, Dr. Landrum, James Corrothers, Gardner Goldsby, Alice Ward Smith, and Silas Floyd."}
{"text":"\"The Voice of the Negro\" first opens with a Monthly Review, which would consist of events that are happening within that year and some insight as to some congressional decisions that had occurred within that year. This journal also includes pieces that are written by the editors discussing a variety of topics. These topics consist of some valuable insight into some of the actions that affect Black people, such as a paper written by Bishop Candler who wrote on the subject of Hostility to lynching. The journal also consists of short stories one of them written by James Corrothers, the title of the short story is \"Lincoln\"."}
{"text":"The credited editors in Vol. Two No. 2 were Gardner Goldsby, Pauline E. Hopkins, Wellington Adams, Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, Daniel Murray, John Henery Adams, and newer material from W.E.B DuBois, Silas X. Floyd, and W. S. Scarborough."}
{"text":"The third volume of The Voice of the Negro, was published in January 1906. This volume continued the same structure as the previous volumes by releasing twelve different installments corresponding to the year's months."}
{"text":"Vol. 3 No. 1 had contributions from Asa Thombson, William Pickens, T.H. Malone, J.W.E. Bowen, G.A. Lee, W.E.B. DuBois, Mrs. L.K. Wiggins, and Benjamin G. Brawley"}
{"text":"Vol. 3 No. 2 had contributions from Alice Ward Smith, Mary White Ovington, J.H. Gray, T.H. Malone, John Henry Adams, Florence Bentley, Daniel Murray, M.A. Majors, Joseph Manning, William Maxwell, John Jenifer, and Silas Floyd"}
{"text":"Vol. 3 No. 3 had contributions from Azalia Marlen, Henry Proctor, James Corrothers, Daniel Murray, Will Hendrickson, W.E.B. DuBois, T. THomas Fortune, Lida Wiggins, S.H. Archer, C.C. Poindexter, Anna Comstock, Fanny Williams, and Henery Middleton"}
{"text":"The fourth volume of The Voice of the Negro, was published in January 1907. This volume continued the same structure as the previous volumes by releasing twelve different installments corresponding to the year's months. This was the last volume produced by The Voice of the Negro."}
{"text":"The first issue of vol. Four was a conjoined issue with content from January and February of 1907, this issue had contributions from J. Francis Lee, Jasper Phillips, John Daniels, Alexnder Chamberlain, W.S. Scarboroguh, Joseph B. Foraker, Lena Lewis, Russell Fleming, Azalia Martin, John Fraser, Daniel Thompson, John Work, Katherine Tillman, Vere Goldthwaite, William Pickens, Florence Bentley, Fiona Macleod, Jack Thorne, and Silas X. Floyd"}
{"text":"The second issue of vol. Four was released in March of 1907 and consisted of contributions from Chas Mayberry, A.D. Delaney, Edward E. Wilson, Will H. Hendrickson, Alexander F. Chamberlain, W.E.B DuBois, W.S. Scarborough, J.E. Bruce, Florence Bentley, William Pickens, John Henery Adams, Mary Church Terrell, Florence Lewis Bentley, William Braithwaite, J.A.G. Luvall, Silas X. Floyd and Mrs. Bettie G. Francis"}
{"text":"\"Praise Song for the Day\" is an occasional poem written by the American poet Elizabeth Alexander and delivered at the 2009 presidential inauguration of President Barack Obama. The poem is the fourth to be delivered at a United States presidential inauguration, following in the tradition of recitals by Robert Frost (John F. Kennedy, 1961), Maya Angelou (Bill Clinton, 1993), and Miller Williams (Bill Clinton, 1997)."}
{"text":"It consists of fourteen unrhymed three-line stanzas (tercets) and a one-line coda. Delivered directly after Obama's inaugural address, it received a lukewarm response and was criticized as \"too prosaic.\" Graywolf Press published the poem in paperback 6 February 2009, with a first printing of 100,000 copies."}
{"text":"Adam Kirsch called the poem \"bureaucratic verse.\""}
{"text":"\"Ballad of Birmingham\" is a poem by Dudley Randall, that he published as a broadside in 1965. It was written in response to the 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The poem was set to music by folk singer Jerry Moore in 1967 after he read it in a newspaper, and features on his album \"Life is a Constant Journey Home\"."}
{"text":"\"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" is a poem by American writer Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote the poem when he was seventeen and crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico. It was first published the following year in \"The Crisis\", starting Hughes's literary career. \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" uses rivers as a metaphor for Hughes's life and the broader African-American experience. It has been reprinted often and is considered one of Hughes's most famous and signature works."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes was born in 1902, in Missouri. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he first began writing. He graduated from Central High School in 1917. Several years after graduating high school, Hughes decided to travel to Mexico City and live with his father, whom he did not know well. He left in 1920."}
{"text":"I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the"}
{"text":"flow of human blood in human veins."}
{"text":"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."}
{"text":"I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young."}
{"text":"I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep."}
{"text":"I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it."}
{"text":"I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln"}
{"text":"went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy"}
{"text":"bosom turn all golden in the sunset."}
{"text":"My soul has grown deep like the rivers.<\/poem>"}
{"text":"Twenty years after its publication, Hughes suggested the poem be turned into a Hollywood film, but the project never went forward."}
{"text":"\"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\" is one of Hughes's earliest poems and is considered to mark the beginning of his career as a poet. Sandra Merriweather in the \"Encyclopedia of American Poetry\" considered the poem to be one of Hughes's best works, and it has been described as his \"signature\" poem. However, it has also been described as one of his \"most uncharacteristic poems\". The work is one of his most famous poems. The professor Ira Dworkin described the poem as \"an iconic representative of Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.\" Upon publication, it \"delighted black traditionalists\", who appreciated the poem's message. Hughes's poems \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\", \"Mother to Son\", and \"Harlem\" were described in the \"Encyclopedia of African-American Writing\" as \"anthems of black America\"."}
{"text":"Hughes wrote the poem while the Great Migration, a movement of African Americans out of the Southern United States and into Northern cities like Chicago, was ongoing. William Hogan, a scholar, places Hughes's poem in the context of this vast uprooting of population, noting that it \"recognizes the need for a new kind of rootedness, one that embraced a history of migration and resettlement. Hogan argues that by connecting \"communities of color across both space and time\", Hughes is developing \"a theory of racial community\" which draws strength from migration and change. The \"many 'routes' historically taken by black culture only strengthen the 'roots' of the community\"."}
{"text":"The scholar Allan Burns feels that the poem is written from the perspective of a \"'soul' or 'consciousness' of black people in general\" rather than Hughes himself. Burns also notes the progression of rivers through the poem from the Euphrates to the Mississippi follows a chronology of history \"from the Garden of Eden [. . .] to modern America.\" By describing the \"muddy bosom\" of the river turning \"golden in the sunset\", Hughes provides a note of hope that Burns equates to the phrase \"per aspera ad astra\" (through suffering to the stars). Hughes himself had not traveled widely when he wrote the poem."}
{"text":"In his early writing, including \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\", Hughes was inspired by American poet Carl Sandburg. Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that part of the poem reinterprets Vachel Lindsay's \"The Congo\", by portraying the Congo River as \"a pastoral nourishing, maternal setting.\" Hughes references the spiritual \"Deep River\" in the line \"My soul has grown deep like the rivers.\" The poem was also influenced by Walt Whitman."}
{"text":"The poem has been cited as becoming \"the voice of the Association [NAACP] itself,\" along with \"Song of the Son\" by Jean Toomer and editorials that Du Bois wrote. One of Hughes's most reprinted works, the poem had been reprinted at least eleven times within ten years of publication, including in the 1925 anthology \"The New Negro,\" the 1927 work \"Caroling Dusk,\" and Hughes's own \"The Dream Keeper\" in 1932."}
{"text":"After Hughes died on May 22, 1967, his ashes were interred in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem under a cosmogram that was inspired by \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\". The cosmogram is entitled \"Rivers\" and was designed by \"Houston Conwill\". In the center of the cosmogram is the line: \"My soul has grown deep like the rivers\"."}
{"text":"Pearl Primus, a dance choreographer, developed a work based on the poem."}
{"text":"Keeping the Night Watch is a children's poetry book written by Hope Anita Smith and illustrated by E. B. Lewis. Published by Square Fish Books as the sequel to Smith's \"The Way a Door Closes\", it was a Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book and appeared on several best children's book lists in 2009."}
{"text":"The book is a series of poems from the perspective of thirteen-year-old C.J. Washington III, the narrator from Smith's 2003 poetry book \"The Way a Door Closes.\" While the prequel captures the experiences and emotions of a family abandoned by their father, \"Keeping the Night Watch\" explores C.J.'s subsequent struggles with the unexpected return of his father and expands on intersecting issues of adolescence, poverty, and urban life."}
{"text":"\"The Weary Blues\" is a poem by American poet Langston Hughes."}
{"text":"Written in 1925, \"The Weary Blues\" was first published in the Urban League magazine, \"\". It was awarded the magazine's prize for best poem of the year. The poem was included in Hughes's first book, a collection of poems, also entitled \"The Weary Blues\". (Four poems from the book, although not the title poem, inspired the musical settings \"Four Songs from The Weary Blues\" by Florence Price)."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes was known as one of the most prominent and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, a rebirth movement of African Americans in the arts during the 1920s. He wrote about the world around him, giving a voice to African Americans during a time of segregation. Hughes was both a contributor and supporter of his fellow African-American writers. Collectively, they changed the way the world viewed African Americans because of their talents and ability to capture real life and turn it into art."}
{"text":"Hughes wrote of inequality (\"I, Too\u201d), of resilience (\"Mother to Son\" and \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers\"), of pride (\"My People\"), of hope (\"Freedom's Plow\"), and of music (\"The Trumpet Player\" and \"Juke Box Love Song\"). He was the author of several novels, a memoir, song lyrics, children's books, plays, countless songs and more than 20 books."}
{"text":"\"The Weary Blues\" takes place at an old Harlem bar on Lenox Avenue. There is a piano player playing the blues. As he plays, the speaker observes his body movement and the tone of his voice. Throughout the poem, several literary devices are used to guide the reader through the mixture of emotions the blues player is feeling. The vivid imagery and use of language gives the reader a more personal glimpse into the life of the man playing the blues."}
{"text":"The music in \u201cThe Weary Blues\u201d is a metaphor for life as a black man. The color in the poem is symbolic of the black struggle. It starts with slave spirituals in which \u201cslaves calculatingly created songs of double-entendre as an intellectual strategy\u201d as Hughes does in his poem. When he says, \u201cI heard a Negro play\u201d he is making the musician decidedly black. The lines \u201cwith his ebony hands on each ivory key \/ He made that poor piano moan with melody\u201d continues the reference to color, and decidedly differentiates black from white. Hughes personifies the piano with a humanly moan, but the moan also indicates his abuse of the \u201civory key\u201d and the \u201cmelancholy tone\u201d of the music."}
{"text":"However, the poem is a celebration of blues. In lines eleven, fourteen and sixteen there are apostrophes to the blues. \u201cO Blues!\u201d and \u201cSweet Blues\u201d are the speaker's exclamations of delight. He just cannot contain himself when it comes to the blues. He even notices the musician enjoying the music and adds the onomatopoeia of a \u201cthump, thump, thump.\u201d The Weary Blues is an enjoyable poem and song, yet its message is one of sadness."}
{"text":"\"The Weary Blues\" is one of Hughes's most famous poems. Critics have claimed that the poem is a combination of blues and jazz with personal experiences. It embodies blues as a metaphor and form. It has also been coined as one of the first works of blues performance in literature. Throughout the poem, music is seen as not only a form of art and entertainment, but also as a way of life: people living the blues. Hughes's ability to incorporate poetry with music and history with art has given him the reputation as one of the leading black artists of the 20th century. \"The Weary Blues\" allows the reader to seek to unlock the mystery of the blues, for both the musician and themselves."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes slow jams \"The Weary Blues\" (1925) to jazz accompaniment with the Doug Parker Band on the CBUT (CBC Vancouver) program \"The 7 O'Clock Show\" in 1958. Host, Bob Quintrell introduces the performance."}
{"text":"\"If We Must Die\" is a poem by Claude McKay published in the July 1919 issue of \"The Liberator\". McKay wrote the poem as a response to mob attacks by white Americans upon African-American communities during Red Summer. The poem does not specifically reference any group of people, and has been used to represent many groups who are persecuted. It is considered one of McKay's most famous poems and was described by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks as one of the most famous poems of all time."}
{"text":"During the Red Summer, from late summer to early autumn 1919, there was a wave of anti-black attacksat least twenty-five major \"mob actions\". In the attacks, hundreds of people were killed and thousands more were injured. James Weldon Johnson coined the term \"Red Summer\" to refer the period. Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889. He moved to the United States in 1912 and after attending several schools settled in New York City. He began to publish more poetry pseudonymously (having first published several collections in Jamaica). McKay's poetry was generally well received, particularly \"To the White Fiends\u201d. Shortly after moving to New York, he met Max Eastman, the publisher of \"The Liberator.\" The two became friends."}
{"text":"McKay experienced the Red Summer personally, seeing violent mobs of white people while he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He wrote \"If We Must Die\" in response to the events. The sonnet was first published in the July 1919 issue of \"The Liberator\"."}
{"text":"Frank Harris had sought to convince McKay to publish the poem in his \"Pearson's Magazine\" and was angry when it was not, telling McKay \"It belongs to me ... I gave you the inspiration to write that sonnet and I want to have the credit of publishing it.\" The poem was reprinted in \"The Messenger\" and the \"Workers' Dreadnought\" (London) later that year. It was widely reprinted in the years that followed."}
{"text":"Tonya Foster wrote that McKay's poem turned those who were persecuted into heroes and described it as a \"call to arms for workers\". By using \"we\" repeatedly, McKay extends his poem to whoever the poem reaches. It is a nonspecific poemthere are no phrases tying it to a specific group or raceand can apply to any group under attack by \"monsters we defy.\""}
{"text":"McKay wrote the poem as a Shakespearean sonnet, using a 'ababcdcdefef' rhyming pattern across three quatrains and ending with a \"perfectly rhymed\" couplet. The poem begins with eight lines written as conditional sentences (if\/then) centered around \"the inevitable death\" of the subject. The next six lines are a separate section. By having three lines that are broken without any punctuation (three, six, and seven), McKay creates a sense of \"immediacy, urgency.\" The sestet, or final six lines, provides a calmer and \"controlled\" resolution each line ends with punctuation. The final line of the poem has two caesuras, or breaks in the phrase."}
{"text":"The scholar Robert A. Lee provided a close reading of the poem in \"CLA Journal\". He noted that \"If We Must Die\" is structured to develop with imagery. It begins the subject being described as \"hogs\" who are \"hunted\" and \"penned\" by \"animals\". In the second quatrain, the animals have become \"monsters\" and the hogs are humanized with \"precious\" blood and the ability to \"defy\" the monsters. Here, instead of the hogs being penned, the monsters have been \"constrained\". In the third, the hogs have developed to \"kinsmen\" while the dogs are \"common\". The poem ends with a couplet where the subject is \"men\" and the monsters are a \"murderous, cowardly pack\". Those who are oppressed continue to fight although they realize they \"must die\"."}
{"text":"The poem was recited in the film \"August 28: A Day in the Life of a People\", which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. Eric Robert Taylor wrote a book about insurrections during the Atlantic slave trade and titled it \"If We Must Die\" after the poem."}
{"text":"\"Let America Be America Again\" is a poem written in 1935 by American poet Langston Hughes. It was originally published in the July 1936 issue of \"Esquire Magazine\". The poem was republished in the 1937 issue of \"Kansas Magazine\" and was revised and included in a small collection of Langston Hughes poems entitled \"A New Song\", published by the International Workers Order in 1938."}
{"text":"The poem speaks of the American dream that never existed for the lower-class American and the freedom and equality that every immigrant hoped for but never received. In his poem, Hughes represents not only African Americans, but other economically disadvantaged and minority groups as well. Besides criticizing the unfair life in America, the poem conveys a sense of hope that the American Dream is soon to come."}
{"text":"The title of this poem was used by Democratic United States senator John Kerry as a campaign slogan in his 2004 presidential campaign."}
{"text":"Afro-Surrealism or Afrosurrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic. In 1974, Amiri Baraka used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote his famous \"Afrosurreal Manifesto\" in which he says, \"Afro-Surrealism sees that all 'others' who create from their actual, lived experience are surrealist...\" The manifesto delineates Afro-Surrealism from Surrealism and Afro-Futurism. The manifesto lists ten tenets that Afro-Surrealism follows including how \"Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past,\" and how \"Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.\""}
{"text":"Afro-Surrealism, in its origins and its ethos as a movement, is global and diasporic. It is practiced and embodied in music, photography, film, the visual arts and poetry. Notable practitioners of Afro-Surrealism include Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Krista Franklin, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Suzanne C\u00e9saire, L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor, Ren\u00e9 M\u00e9nil, Kool Keith, Terence Nance, Will Alexander, India Sky Davis, Yetunde Olagbaju, Kara Walker, Samuel R. Delany,Starr Finch, Romare Bearden, Christopher Burch,"}
{"text":"The AfroSurreal arts movement came about after D. Scot Miller penned \"The Afrosurreal Manifesto\" for The San Francisco Bay Guardian in May, 2009. Until that time, the term \"Afrosurreal Expressionism\" was used solely by Amiri Baraka to describe the writings of Henry Dumas. Later that year, Miller spoke with Baraka about extending the term by shortening the description. It was agreed by the two of them that \"Afrosurreal\" without the \"expressionism\" would allow further exploration of the term. Afrosurrealism may have some similar origins to surrealism in the mid-1920s, in that an aspect of it [Negritude] came after Andr\u00e9 Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, but as Leopold Senghor points out in Miller's manifesto, \u201cEuropean Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.\u201d."}
{"text":"Afro-Surrealism incorporates aspects of the Harlem Renaissance, N\u00e9gritude and Black Radical Imagination as described by Professor Robin DG Kelley in his definitive work Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2003), and further with his Afrosurreal historical anthology, \"Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora\" (2009). Aspects of Afro-Surrealism can be traced to Martiniquan Suzanne C\u00e9saire\u2019s discussion of the \u201crevolutionary impetus of surrealism\u201d in the 1940s."}
{"text":"Though much has been written and said about artist\/activist\/statesmen Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, much more needs to written about his partner Suzanne, a surrealist thinker and an important figure in the history of the Afrosurreal aesthetic . Her quest for \u201cThe Marvelous\u201d over the \u201cmiserablism\u201d expressed in the usual arts of protest inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially Ren\u00e9 M\u00e9nil."}
{"text":"\u201cThe true task of mankind consists solely in the attempt to bring the marvelous into real life,\u201d M\u00e9nil says in \u201cIntroduction to the Marvelous,\u201d[1930s] \u201cso that life can become more encompassing. So long as the mythic imagination is not able to overcome each and every boring mediocrity, human life will amount to nothing but useless, dull experiences, just killing time, as they say.\u201d"}
{"text":"Suzanne C\u00e9saire\u2019s proclamation, \u201cBe in permanent readiness for The Marvelous,\u201d quickly became a credo of the movement; the word \u201cmarvelous\u201d has since become re-contextualized with regard to contemporary black arts and interventions."}
{"text":"In his 1956 essay for \"Pr\u00e9sence Africaine,\" Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis wrote:\" \"What, then, is the Marvellous, except the imagery in which a people wraps its experience, reflects its conception of the world and of life, its faith, its hope, its confidence in man, in a great justice, and the explanation which it finds for the forces antagonistic to progress?\"\" In his work, Alexis is seen to have an acute sense of reality that is not unlike that of traditional surrealism, and his coining of the term \"Marvelous Realism\" reflects his influence by the earlier works of the Negritude\/Black Surrealist Movement."}
{"text":"The term \"Afro-Surrealism\" was coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1974 essay on Black Arts Movement avant-garde writer Henry Dumas. Baraka notes that Dumas is able to write about ancient mysteries that were simultaneously relevant to the present day. The idea that the past resurfaces to haunt the present day is crucial to Afro-Surrealism."}
{"text":"Unlike Afro-Futurism which speculates on possibilities in the future, Afrosurrealism, as Miller describes, is about the present. \"Rather than speculate on the coming of the four horseman, Afrosurrealists understand that they rode through too long ago. Through Afrosurrealism, artists expose this form of the future past that is right now.\""}
{"text":"Much of Afro-Surrealism is concerned with the everyday life because it is said that there is nothing more surreal than the Black experience. According to Terri Francis, \"Afrosurrealism is art with skin on it where the texture of the object tells its story, how it weathered burial below consciousness, and how it emerged somewhat mysteriously from oceans of forgotten memories and discarded keepsakes. This photograph figures Afrosurrealism as bluesy, kinky-spooky.\""}
{"text":"In the manifesto from which present day Afrosurrealism is based, writer D. Scot Miller states in a response to Afrofuturism:"}
{"text":"\"Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need for tomorrow\u2019s-tongue speculation about the future. Concentration camps, bombed-out cities, famines, and enforced sterilization have already happened. To the Afro-Surrealist, the Tasers are here. The Four Horsemen rode through too long ago to recall. What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.\""}
{"text":"As The AfroSurreal Manifesto and Afrofuturism come to the fore in artistic, commercial and academic circles, the struggle between the specific and \u201cthe scent\u201d of present-day manifestations of Black absurdity has come with it, posing interesting challenges to both movements. For Afrofuturists, this challenge has been met by inserting Afrocentric elements into its growing pantheon, the intention being to centralize Afrofuturist focus back on the continent of Africa to enhance its specificity. For the Afrosurrealists, the focus has been set at the \u201chere and now\u201d of contemporary Black arts and situations in the Americas, Antilles, and beyond, searching for the nuanced \u201cscent\u201d of those current manifestations."}
{"text":"\"Zong!,\" M. NourbSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng."}
{"text":"nappy edges is a collection of poetry and prose poetry written by Ntozake Shange and first published by St. Martin's Press in 1978. The poems, which vary in voice and style, explore themes of love, racism, sexism, and loneliness. Shange's third book of poetry, \"nappy edges,\" was met with positive reviews and praise from critics, like Holly Prado of the \"Los Angeles Times\" who said of it that \"this collection of poems, prose poems and poetic essays merges personal passion and heightened language.\""}
{"text":"The collection is divided into five sections of poetry and prose. The first section, \"things i wd say\", contains an opening essay on the nature of poetry called \"takin a solo\/ a poetic possibility\/ a poetic imperative\", and is followed by four more sections: \"love & other highways\", \"closets\", \"& she bleeds\", and \"whispers with the unicorn\". Although each section of the volume is distinct, the poems are all in conversation with each other and cover similar themes."}
{"text":"The subtitle of the collection is \"the roots of your hair\/what turns back when we sweat, run, make love, dance, get afraid, get happy: the tell-tale sign of living.\" The salient themes of the various writings within \"nappy edges\" all can be tied back to the multifaceted existence and complicated identities of black women. Like her plays, novels, and choreopoems, Shange's poems are as humorous as they are tragic, and explore a variety of themes."}
{"text":"Many of Shange's poems are about poetry itself\u2014what it means to write it and what it means to read it. In \"takin a solo\/ a poetic possibility\/ a poetic imperative\", she implores black writers to cultivate the kinds of distinctive and original voices that we appreciate and expect from black musicians. Her fear is that black voices will fade into indistinction, and eventually their voices won't be recognizable at all."}
{"text":"In \"inquiry\", Shange explains the importance that poems elicit a visceral reaction out of the reader in the same way that a kiss or cold water would. Following this expectation, Shange focusses some of her poems on the responsibility of the poet to the reader. Generally speaking, the poet is expected to speak on behalf of communities, and to transport the reader to places they've never even been, but Shange emphasizes the necessity of the poet showing you what they know personally. By placing importance on the personal rather than the universal, Shange is able to explore the interiority of her personas' minds."}
{"text":"Shange also looks at what it means to be a black woman poet when the world of poetry is dominated by white men. Particularly during this historical moment in the late 1970s, not long after the Black Arts Movement which was a very male-dominated and patriarchal movement, Shange's position as a black woman poet is groundbreaking. She challenges the idea that words and poetry belong to men, and points to how unfair it is that when a woman does something, an 'ess' is added to the title (as in \"poetess\")."}
{"text":"Stories of love and relationships can be found in each section of \"nappy edges\". Shange explores how traditional gender dynamics can mistreat women. From manipulative men who take advantage of women sexually, to women who stand up for themselves, each poem tells a different story. Shange explores love and relationships as spaces where women should be able to seek their own pleasure, sexual or otherwise. By showing how sex and love can either torment or uplift women, Shange is able to"}
{"text":"Although the women in Shange's poems are self-sufficient, there is still an overarching theme of loneliness throughout \"nappy edges\". Rather than dwelling on this loneliness, Shange focusses on the theme of self-care as a woman and as a poet. It is clear from these poems that being a woman and being a poet in a patriarchal society is not easy, but Shange relies on herself and her creativity for survival. This self-care takes different forms, from talking to herself to writing poetry, but she insists that black women in particular take care of themselves, and claims that this is both a personal and political struggle."}
{"text":"Shange is also incredibly influenced by music, particularly Jazz and Blues artists. Her poems are lyrical and sometimes reminiscent of the style of improvisation in jazz. \"i live in music\", for instance, is explicitly about Shange's love of music, and doesn't stick to a particular rhythm or meter (like most of her poems). Shange recorded a version of \"i live in music\" accompanied by the William Goffigan Ensemble, which demonstrates both the connection between her poems and music, and her poetry's innate musicality."}
{"text":"\"Note on Commercial Theatre\" is a poem by Langston Hughes written in 1940 and republished in 2008."}
{"text":"Langston Hughes was a prominent writer during the Harlem Renaissance, which is obvious in most of his poetry. Hughes writes about the issues of the day, and \"Note on Commercial Theatre\" is no different."}
{"text":"During the Harlem Renaissance, one of the main controversies was that African American culture became the \"vogue\" of the day. This included interest not only in black writing and art, but in the rising jazz and theatre scenes as well. Harlem became the hot spot for this new black culture; both black and whites explored and became immersed in it. Because it was so popular, many white people attempted to infuse their own art with the new African American styles, resulting in hybrid music and theatre (for example, a swing version of \"The Mikado\", a comic opera)."}
{"text":"Hughes was a huge proponent of creating a separate black identity and art, hence the extreme antipathy within \"Note on Commercial Theatre\" to black culture being absorbed by whites. This is reflected in his use of an experimental form for his poem; there is a lack of rhyme scheme and no discernible rhythm to the lines. Other black writers of the time, such as Countee Cullen, experimented within specific forms, but Hughes rejects form in this poem; he rejects the absorption into any other style but his own."}
{"text":"This vogue of African American culture became a controversy because not only was it becoming meshed with white culture in a time when the Pan-African movement was strong and blacks were trying to create a separate identity, but \"Note on Commercial Theatre\" also shows an anxiety over the dependence of black culture on white patronage. It was hard for African Americans to become published or find an audience outside of Harlem without going through white publishing houses. The final lines of the poem reflect the idea that for a truly African American culture to persist, it would have to be founded from within its own community:"}
{"text":"\"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria\" is a two-page poem by Langston Hughes, accompanied by illustrations by Walter Steinhilber, which takes the form of a parody of a magazine advertisement. The poem was first published in \"The New Masses\" in December 1931 and later in Hughes's autobiography of that time period, \"The Big Sea\". The poem is considered one of Hughes' most direct indictments of economic inequality of the 1930s."}
{"text":"The poem was composed in response to a multi-page advertisement for the new $28 million hotel Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. The Great Depression had begun to hit New Yorkers and disproportionately affected minorities in the city. The disparity between the rich and poor was widening at the onset of the Depression and Jim Crow laws furthered that economic hardship along racial lines. Hughes said of the poem:"}
{"text":"\"The hotel opened at the very time when people were sleeping on newspapers in doorways, because they had no place to go. But suites in the Waldorf ran into thousands a year, and dinner in the Sert Room was ten dollars! (Negroes, even if they had the money, couldn't eat there. So naturally, I didn't care much for the Waldorf-Astoria.)\""}
{"text":"The poem is viewed as a response to the economic milieu as well as cultural, racial, and class issues. \"Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria\" is frequently grouped together with Hughes's other radical leftist writings of the 1930s. When Hughes first submitted his manuscript for \"The Big Sea\", Carl Van Vechten found that \"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria\" was \"bad economics and bad poetry\" but he nonetheless encouraged its inclusion in the collection stating that it was a part of Hughes's \"essential history\"."}
{"text":"When it was published in \"The Big Sea\" in 1940 Richard Wright wrote of the poem that it exemplified the toughness of Hughes that he could approach even the solidarity he feels with the working class with \"humor, urbanity, and objectivity\"."}
{"text":"Dancing the Dream is a 1992 book of poems and reflections written by the American recording artist Michael Jackson. His second book, it followed his 1988 autobiography \"Moonwalk\". \"Dancing the Dream\" was dedicated to his mother, Katherine, and Deepak Chopra. Its foreword was written by Jackson's friend, the actress Elizabeth Taylor. The book also contains an assortment of around 100\u00a0photographs of Jackson."}
{"text":"\"Dancing the Dream\" was published by Doubleday on June 18, 1992, seven months after the release of Jackson's 1991 \"Dangerous\" album. It was not a significant commercial success. The book was reissued by the British publisher Transworld on July 27, 2009, following Jackson's death the previous month on June 25, 2009."}
{"text":"Jackson dedicated \"Dancing the Dream\" \"with love\" to his mother Katherine, and has an introduction written by his longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor."}
{"text":"The volume consists of 46 pieces of poetry and essays. The subjects Jackson writes about are primarily children, animals and the environment. For example, one specific poem titled \"Look Again, Baby Seal\" promotes environmentalism as Jackson imagines anthropomorphic seals who brood about the fate of being killed by hunters. Another poem (\"So the Elephants March\") presents elephants that refuse to be killed in order for ivory pieces to be made from their tusks. A third piece (\"Mother Earth\") describes a struggle to cope with the discovery of an oil-covered seagull feather. To stress the theme of environmentalism and the necessity for action, Jackson writes in the essay, \"We've been treating Mother Earth the way some people treat a rental apartment. Just trash it and move on.\""}
{"text":"\"Dancing the Dream\" includes approximately 100 photographs. Although the volume was promoted to include previously unreleased photographs of Jackson, some of the photographs had been previously published, such as those that were published in the 1985 Jackson calendar, and others that had been published in magazines such as \"Ebony\" and \"People\". Furthermore, the volume included photographs converted from stills of Jackson's music videos \"Black or White\" (1991) and \"Remember the Time\" (1992), in addition to images of his 1991 performance at MTV's tenth anniversary celebration. Jackson commissioned artwork for \"Dancing the Dream\" from Nate Giorgio and David Nordahl, whom Jackson met in the 1980s and with whom he subsequently developed a professional relationship."}
{"text":"\"Dancing the Dream\" was first published on June 18, 1992, by Doubleday. It followed Jackson's 1988 autobiography \"Moonwalk\", which was also published by the American company. Prior to publication, \"Dancing the Dream\" was hailed by the publishers as a book that would \"take us deep into [Jackson's] heart and soul\", as well as \"an inspirational and passionate volume of unparalleled humanity\". In his only interview to promote \"Dancing the Dream\", Jackson described the book as being \"just a verbal expression of what I usually express through my music and my dance.\" After his death on June 25, 2009, the British company Transworld reissued the book the following month on July 27, 2009."}
{"text":"A representative for Doubleday (Marly Rusoff) revealed in March 1993 that the company shipped 133,000 copies of the book, and took around 80,000 returns and 3000 reorders. Thus, the project was close to 60% down in total sales. Rusoff stated that the commercial performance of \"Dancing the Dream\" was low because an anticipated Jackson tour of the United States never occurred. He commented, \"The reviews\u2014and there were some\u2014were rather discouraging. He did do a Europe tour and the British edition did quite well. This kind of book depends on celebrity visibility.\""}
{"text":"During a Simulchat in 1995, Jackson stated, \"I wrote a book called \"Dancing the Dream\". It was more autobiographical than \"Moonwalk\", which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn't full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don't think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I've thought about while on tour.\""}
{"text":"\"Bury Me in a Free Land\" is a poem by African-American writer and abolitionist Frances Harper, written for \"The Anti-Slavery Bugle\" newspaper in 1858."}
{"text":"The poem implies that the speaker is dying soon, which lends her request a sense of urgency. The message being presented as a sort of deathbed wish also gives the request stronger moral authority. The use of grave imagery to draw sympathy to the plight of enslaved people was popularized with Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular novel \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\" (1852), whose titular character is buried in an unmarked grave. Harper's poem seems to threaten that the narrator will haunt those who survive as she \"could not rest\" if she was buried in a land where people are enslaved."}
{"text":"Harper sent a copy of the poem to the widow of John Brown after his execution for his raid on Harpers Ferry. She also republished the poem after emancipation in the United States in the January 14, 1864, issue of \"The Liberator\"."}
{"text":"This poem was recited in the film \"August 28: A Day in the Life of a People\", which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016."}
{"text":"An excerpt from the poem is on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The excerpt reads: \"I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves.\""}
{"text":"Another Country is a 1962 novel by James Baldwin. The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village and Harlem, New York City, in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including bisexuality, interracial couples and extramarital affairs."}
{"text":"Baldwin started writing \"Another Country\" in Greenwich Village in 1948 and continued to write the novel in Paris and again in New York. Despite his privately confessed reluctance to bring \"\"Another Country\", unfinished, into yet another country,\" Baldwin completed the book in Istanbul in 1962. In 1959, amidst growing fame, Baldwin received a $12,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support his work on the book."}
{"text":"Baldwin had returned to the United States in 1957, partly to cover the mounting Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin admired King, but sought to depict relationships deeper than King's \"brotherly love.\""}
{"text":"One author felt the title echoes lines in Christopher Marlowe's \"The Jew of Malta\":"}
{"text":"The book uses a third-person narrator who is nevertheless closely aware of the characters' emotions."}
{"text":"The first fifth of \"Another Country\" tells of the downfall of jazz drummer Rufus Scott. He begins a relationship with Leona, a white woman from the South, and introduces her to his social circle, including his closest friend, struggling novelist Vivaldo, his more successful mentor Richard, and Richard's wife Cass. Initially, the relationship is frivolous, but it turns more serious as they continue to live together. Rufus becomes habitually physically abusive of Leona, and she is admitted to a mental hospital in the South. Depressed, Rufus returns to Harlem and commits suicide, jumping off the George Washington Bridge."}
{"text":"The rest of the book explores relationships between Rufus' friends, family, and acquaintances in the wake of his death. Rufus's friends cannot understand the suicide, and experience some guilt over his death. Afterwards, they become closer. Vivaldo begins a relationship with Rufus's sister Ida, which is strained by racial tension and Ida's bitterness after her brother's death."}
{"text":"Eric, an actor and Rufus' first male lover, returns to New York after years living in France, where he met his longtime lover Yves. Eric returns to the novel's social circle but is calmer and more composed than most of the group. Everyone's relationships become strained in the course of the novel. Ida starts having an affair with Ellis, an advertising executive who promises to help with her career as a singer. Cass, who has become lonely due to Richard's writing career, has an affair with Eric after he arrives in New York. At the novel's climax, Cass tells Richard about her affair with Eric, who in turn has a sexual encounter with Vivaldo, who himself learns about Ida's relationship with Ellis."}
{"text":"Baldwin called Rufus Scott \"the black corpse floating in the national psyche,\" as well as a Christ figure\u2014a living (and dying) symbol of suffering black men. Rufus's death has been described as tantamount to murder."}
{"text":"Because Rufus is living in a predominantly racist era, his life is constantly affected by an internalization of this racism to the point where he hates himself. Throughout the novel, the effects of this internalized oppression are obvious: he is sexual with any person who is white \u2014 violently sexual, because he seeks power; he feels disappointed in himself because of his proud black sister Ida, and he avoids the support of his family during his last day of life."}
{"text":"The concept of \"another country\" reflects not only the return of Eric to the United States from France, but also the feelings of alienation experienced by African Americans within the United States."}
{"text":"\"Another Country\" was unique at the time, in its attempt to explore race relations through romantic love instead of homosocial friendships."}
{"text":"The relationship between Ida and Vivaldo serves as a microcosm for the relationship between African Americans and white liberals. Their relationship and others (including the earlier coupling of Rufus and Leona) represent a struggle for love amidst the obstacles of race, sex, and modern society. According to Baldwin biographer W. J. Weatherby:"}
{"text":"Whether it was the central relationship between white Vivaldo and black Ida or the accompanying bisexual affairs involving most of the other leading characters, all were intended by Baldwin to illustrate how difficult he felt real love was in contemporary American society. Facing each other without lies and perceiving the relationship realistically were much more important than which sexes were involved or how love was expressed, in Baldwin's opinion.\u2026 The whole racial situation, according to the novel, was basically a failure of love."}
{"text":"Racial and sexual differences are compared and contrasted, both represented as areas for conflict that must be addressed en route to mature love. According to some readings, this complete unity represents another \"another country\" and perhaps an impossible utopia. Stefanie Dunning wrote:"}
{"text":"Dunning argues that the novel's critique of nationalism extends to black nationalism, which still relies on a fantasy of authentic and heterosexual reproduction."}
{"text":"At the opposite end of the spectrum, after considerable youthful struggles with self-acceptance of his homosexuality due to social ostracism in his hometown in Alabama, Eric eventually becomes the novel's most honest and open character. He admits that Rufus was abusive of Leona, that he actually does not reciprocate Cass's love, and that his love of Yves is genuine. This also makes him the book's calmest and most composed character. Only after a night with Eric does Vivaldo see the world more clearly and make tentative steps toward acceptance of his own bisexuality."}
{"text":"Most of the white characters in the book downplay or refuse to admit the racial tension surrounding them. Cass and Richard are shocked when a group of black boys beat up their sons. Ida constantly suspects Vivaldo of exploiting her because she is black and has known white men who seek out sexual relations specifically with black women. Vivaldo refuses to admit any of this, although it is indicated that it may be true of their relationship."}
{"text":"Richard and Vivaldo are jealous of one another as writers. Vivaldo essentially denies the value of Richard's first novel and is jealous that it is being published, while Richard is jealous of Vivaldo because Richard thinks his wife Cass sees suffering and a lack of commercial success as a sign of artistic integrity. Consequently, after Cass and Eric initiate their affair, Richard suspects she is seeing Vivaldo."}
{"text":"Also, Ida's beginning recognition as a jazz singer causes increased tension and jealousy between her and Vivaldo."}
{"text":"In his 1968 essay \"Notes On A Native Son\", from his book \"Soul on Ice\", Eldridge Cleaver denounced the concept of interracial homosexuality and, in effect, acted as the mouthpiece for the hegemonic narrative that framed black homosexual masculinity in America in the 1960s. He expressed not so much a discomfort with homosexuality as with the power paradigm and ultimate feminization that ensues after the physical act of black men sexually submitting to white men:"}
{"text":"\"Another Country\" received much attention and mixed reviews. Reviews in the black press were generally favorable. \"The New York Times\" called it \"a sad story, brilliantly and fiercely told\" and compared it to T. S. Eliot's \"The Waste Land\" as a record of spiritual desolation in modern times. \"Time\" magazine called it \"a failure\". Norman Mailer said it was \"abominably written\". It quickly became a bestseller."}
{"text":"A film adaptation was announced in 1964, with Tony Richardson directing and Baldwin himself writing the screenplay, though the film was never produced."}
{"text":"The book was designated \"obscene\" in New Orleans and banned, drawing the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In Australia, the Commonwealth Customs Department banned its import. The country's Literature Censorship Board, while admitting Baldwin's writing had some merit, described \"Another Country\" as \"continually smeared with indecent, offensive and dirty epithets and allusions\". The chairman noted that some might connect the novel's depiction of race relations with current events in Australia, and bearing in mind that a complete ban might damage the country's reputation, suggested that the book be available to \"the serious minded student or reader.\""}
{"text":"Baldwin inferred from the book's popularity that \"many more people than are willing to admit it lead lives not at all unlike the lives of the people in my book.\" Baldwin also said that the book \"scared people because most don't understand it.\""}
{"text":"Eldridge Cleaver had harsh words for Baldwin, in his book \"Soul on Ice\", writing that he admired Baldwin in some ways but felt increasingly uncomfortable with his writing. Cleaver says that \"Another Country\" made clear why his \"love for Baldwin's vision had become ambivalent,\" and writes:"}
{"text":"Rufus Scott, a pathetic wretch who indulged in the white man's pastime of committing suicide, who let a white homosexual fuck him in the ass, and who took a Southern Jezebel for his woman, with all that these tortured relationships imply, was the epitome of a black eunuch who has completely submitted to the white man. Yes, Rufus was a psychological freedom rider, turning the ultimate cheek, murmuring like a ghost \"You took the best so why not take the rest\", which has absolutely nothing to do with the way that Negroes have managed to survive here in the hells of North America!"}
{"text":"The book was listed by Anthony Burgess as one of his \"Ninety-nine Novels: The best in English since 1939\"."}
{"text":"On writing the book, Baldwin said in the \"New York Times Book Review\":I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound. I am not an intellectual, not in the dreary sense that word is used today, and do not want to be: I am aiming at what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion.' Asked to cite literary influences, Baldwin said that Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and George Bernard Shaw were his \"models.\" The character of Yves is connected to Baldwin's lover Lucien Happersberger, who made plans in 1960 to meet Baldwin in New York City."}
{"text":"It has been argued that James Baldwin is in three characters: Rufus as Baldwin would have turned out had he not moved to France; Eric as Baldwin was in Paris; and Vivaldo as a writer struggling with a writer's block because of his love affairs, in the manner of Baldwin himself. Baldwin has also been identified with Ida, as Rufus's advocate after death, and Richard, a writer who has become successful."}
{"text":"Baldwin later said that he developed the character of Rufus to complement and explain Ida."}
{"text":"The book has been described as an implicit criticism of Mailer's \"The White Negro\" and its passive romanticization of black culture. Brandon Gordon describes this critique in terms of the relationship between Vivaldo and Rufus, mediated by Leona. Gordon writes: \"Contrary to Vivaldo's expectations, emulating the African American's hypermasculine sexual ethos does not ultimately enable him to fulfill the hipster's fantasy of embodied identification.\" He concludes that, in fact, Vivaldo's homosexual encounter with Eric at the end of the novel\u2014and specifically the fact that Vivaldo is penetrated\u2014represents a truer form of \"embodied identification\" with another."}
{"text":"Another Brooklyn is a 2016 novel by Jacqueline Woodson. The book was written as an adult book, unlike many of the author's previous books and titles. NPR wrote that the book was \"full of dreams and danger\". It was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016."}
{"text":"The story starts with August, an adult anthropologist, returning to New York to bury her father. On the subway, she encounters an old friend, and begins to reminisce. She remembers being an 8 year old girl moving with her father and younger brother to Brooklyn from Tennessee after the death of her mother. The book then follows August through her teenage years. August shares friendships with three other Brooklynites, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, as they walk through the neighborhoods and dream optimistically of the future, and revealing what it held in store for them. August and her friends also face dangers on the streets, and family strife of various types."}
{"text":"The book received many reviews. To \"The Washington Post\", it is a \"short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper.\" \"Publishers Weekly\" writes that it is a \"a vivid mural of what it was like to grow up African-American in Brooklyn during the 1970s.\""}
{"text":"NBC News wrote that it \"weaves together themes of death, friendship, Black migrations, the sense of displacement that usually follows, and family.\" \"The New York Times\" said \"the subject isn\u2019t as much girlhood, as the haunting half-life of its memory.\" Kaitlyn Greenidge for \"The Boston Globe\" wrote that the book was \"a love letter to loss, girlhood and home. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of family, memory and other ties that bind us to one another and the world.\" \"USA Today\" gave it 3 out of 4 stars."}
{"text":"\"The Los Angeles Times\" said that the book \"joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn\u2019t enough, like that of Toni Morrison\u2019s 'Sula,' Tayari Jones\u2019 'Silver Sparrow' and \" by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship.\""}
{"text":"Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. \"Beloved\" is inspired by a true-life incident involving Margaret Garner, an escaped slave from Kentucky who fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856, but was captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, they found that she had killed her two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children to spare them from being returned to slavery."}
{"text":"Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled \"A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child\" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the \"American Baptist\", and reproduced in \"The Black Book\", a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974."}
{"text":"The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by \"The New York Times\" ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006."}
{"text":"The book's dedication reads \"Sixty Million and more\", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is Romans 9:25."}
{"text":"\"Beloved\" begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel."}
{"text":"One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver\u2019s contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, whom she begins to believe is her older sister come back."}
{"text":"Paul D begins to feel increasingly uncomfortable in the house and that he is being driven out. One night, Paul D is cornered by Beloved, who demands sex. While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past. Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it, but cannot. Instead, he says that he wants her pregnant. Sethe is afraid to have to live for a baby. When Paul D tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe."}
{"text":"Paul D confronts Sethe, who tells him that after escaping from Sweet Home and joining her children at 124, four horsemen came to return her children and her to a life of slavery at Sweet Home. Sethe ran to the woodshed with her children and tried to kill them all, but only had time to kill her eldest daughter. Sethe says that she was \"trying to put [her] babies where they would be safe.\" Paul D leaves, telling her her love is \"too thick\"; she retorts that \"thin love is no love\", adamant that she did the right thing."}
{"text":"Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs' privilege and horror at Sethe killing Beloved. Local women come to the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, a White man, Mr. Bodwin (their landlord, who had offered work to Baby Suggs and Sethe) arrives at the house on a horse for Denver, who asked him for a job. Not knowing this, Sethe attacks him with an ice pick, thinking he was Schoolteacher coming back for her daughter. The village women and Denver hold her back and Beloved disappears."}
{"text":"Denver becomes a working member of the community, and Paul D returns to a bed-ridden Sethe, who, devastated at Beloved's disappearance, remorsefully tells him that Beloved was her \"best thing\". He replies that Sethe is her own \"best thing\", leaving her questioning, \"Me? Me?\" As time goes on, those who knew Beloved gradually forget her until all traces of her are gone."}
{"text":"The maternal bonds between Sethe and her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in killing one daughter, her own \"best self\". Her surviving daughter becomes estranged from the Black community. Both outcomes result from Sethe trying to salvage her \"fantasy of the future\", her children, from a life in slavery."}
{"text":"In Ohio, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver's need for interaction with the Black community to enter into womanhood. At the end of the novel, Denver succeeds in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Sethe only becomes individuated after Beloved's exorcism. Then, she is free to fully accept the first relationship that is completely \"for her\", her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves her from the self-destruction she was causing based on her maternal bonds with her children."}
{"text":"Beloved and Sethe are both emotionally impaired, which come from Sethe having been enslaved. Under slavery, mothers lost their children, with devastating consequences for both. Baby Suggs dealt with this by refusing to become close with her children and remembering what she could of them, but Sethe tried to hold onto them and fight for them, to the point of killing them so they could be free. Sethe was traumatized by having had her milk stolen, unable to form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter of feeding her."}
{"text":"Because of the suffering under slavery, most people who had been enslaved tried to repress these memories in an attempt to forget the past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver all suffered a loss of self, which could only be remedied when they were able to reconcile their pasts and memories of earlier identities. Beloved serves to remind these characters of their repressed memories, eventually leading to the reintegration of their selves."}
{"text":"The discussion of manhood and masculinity is foreshadowed by the dominant meaning of Sethe's story. \"Beloved\" depicts slavery in two main emotions: Love and Self-Preservation; however, Morrison does more than depict emotions."}
{"text":"The author accurately depicts the horrors of enslavement and its effects to communicate the morals of manhood. It also distorts a man from himself. Morrison revealed different pathways to the meaning of manhood by her stylistic devices. She established new information for understanding the legacy of slavery best depicted through stylistic devices. To understand Paul D's perception of manhood, Morrison deliberately inserts his half-formed words and thoughts, to provide the audience a \"taste\" of what is going on inside his mind."}
{"text":"Yet, throughout the novel, Paul D's depiction of manhood was being constantly challenged by the norms and values of White culture. The author demonstrates the distinctions between Western and African values, and how the dialogue between the two values is heard through juxtaposition and allusions. She maneuvered her \"message\" though the social atmosphere of her words, which was further highlighted by the character's motives and actions."}
{"text":"Paul D is a victim of racism in that his dreams and goals are so high that he will never be able to achieve them because of racism. He thought he earned his right to reach each of his goals because of his sacrifices and what he has been through, that society would pay him back and allow him to do what his heart desired."}
{"text":"During the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws were put in place to limit the movement and involvement of African Americans in the White-dominant society. Black men during this time had to establish their own identity, which may seem impossible due to all the limitations put upon them. Many Black men, like Paul D, struggled to find their meaning in their society and achieving their goals because of the \"disabilities\" that constrained them to a certain part of the social hierarchy."}
{"text":"In \"Beloved,\" Stamp Paid observes Paul D sitting on the base of the church steps \"\u2026 liquor bottle in hand, stripped of the very maleness that enables him to caress and love the wounded Sethe\u2026\" (132). Throughout the novel, Paul D is sitting on a base of some sort or a foundation like a tree stub or the steps, for instance. This exemplifies his place in society. Black men are the foundation of society because without their hard labor, the white men would not profit. They were coerced into the society where they were deemed \"lower-status\" because of the color of their skin."}
{"text":"Family relationships are an instrumental element of \"Beloved,\" which help visualize the stress and the dismantlement of African-American families in this era. The slavery system did not allow African Americans to have rights to themselves, their family, their belongings, or their children. So, Sethe killing Beloved was deemed a peaceful act because Sethe believed that killing her daughter was saving her. By doing this, their family is divided and fragmented, much like the time in which they were living. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, formerly enslaved families were broken and bruised because of the hardships they faced while they were enslaved."}
{"text":"Since enslaved people could not participate in societal events, they put their faith and trust in the supernatural. They performed rituals and prayed to their god or multiple gods."}
{"text":"In the novel, Beloved, who was murdered at the hands of her mother Sethe, haunts Sethe. For example, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D go to the neighborhood carnival, which happens to be Sethe's first social outing since killing her daughter. When they return home, Beloved appears at the house. Throughout the novel, Sethe believes that the person claiming to be Beloved is her daughter that she killed 18 years prior - a scenario that shows how [fractured] family relationships are used to display the mental strife the protagonist faces."}
{"text":"The pain throughout this novel is universal because everyone involved in slavery was heavily scarred, whether that be physically, mentally, sociologically, or psychologically. Some of the characters tend to \"romanticize\" their pain, in a way that each experience is a turning point in one's life. This concept is played throughout history in early Christian contemplative tradition and African-American blues tradition."}
{"text":"\"Beloved\" is a book of the systematic torture that people who had been enslaved had to deal with after the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, in this novel, the narrative is like a complex labyrinth because all the characters have been \"stripped away\" from their voices, their narratives, their language in a way that their sense of self is diminished. Also, all the characters have had different experiences with slavery, which is why their stories and their narratives are distinct from each other."}
{"text":"Paul D retains his slave name; most of the enslaved men at Sweet Home were named Paul. He also retains many painful memories from enslavement and being forced to live in a chain gang; he had been moving around continuously before arriving at 124. He has a \"tobacco tin\" for a heart, in which he contains his painful memories, until Beloved opens it. Years after their time together at Sweet Home, Paul D and Sethe reunite and begin a romantic relationship. He acts fatherly towards Denver and is the first to be suspicious of Beloved. Despite their long past, he fails to understand Sethe fully because of her motherhood and because of the many years that had passed since."}
{"text":"Denver is Sethe's only child who remains at House 124. Isolated from her community after Beloved's killing, Denver forms a close bond with her mother. Upon Beloved's arrival, Denver watches as her sister's ghost begins to exhibit demonic activity. Although introduced as a childish character, Denver develops into a protective woman throughout the novel. In the final chapters, Denver fights not only for her personal independence, but also for her mother's wellbeing, breaking the cycle of isolation at House 124. She is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel."}
{"text":"Baby Suggs is Sethe's mother-in-law. Her son Halle worked to buy her freedom, after which she travels to Cincinnati and establishes herself as a respected leader in the community, preaching for the Black people to love themselves because other people will not. This respect turns sour after she turns some food into a feast, earning their envy, as well as Sethe's act of infanticide. Baby Suggs retires to her bed, where she thinks about pretty colors for the rest of her life. She dies at 70 in the beginning of the book, 8 years before the main events."}
{"text":"Halle is the son of Baby Suggs, the husband of Sethe and father of her children. Sethe and he were married in Sweet Home, yet they got separated during her escape. He is only mentioned in flashbacks. Paul D was the last to see Halle, churning butter at Sweet Home. He is presumed to have gone mad after seeing residents of Sweet Home violating Sethe. He is hardworking and good, qualities that Paul D sees in Denver at the end of the book, but ones that Baby Suggs fears make him a target."}
{"text":"Schoolteacher is the primary discipliner, violent, abusive, and cruel to the people he enslaved at Sweet Home, whom he views as animals. He comes for Sethe following her escape, but she kills her daughter and is arrested, instead."}
{"text":"Amy Denver is a young White girl who finds Sethe desperately trying to make her way to safety after her escape from Sweet Home, trying to get to Boston herself. Sethe is extremely pregnant at the time, and her feet are bleeding badly from the travel. Amy helps nurture her and deliver Sethe's daughter on a small boat, and Sethe names the child Denver after her."}
{"text":"In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey."}
{"text":"In January 2016, \"Beloved\" was broadcast in 10 episodes by BBC Radio 4 as part of its \"15 Minute Drama\" programme. The radio series was adapted by Patricia Cumper."}
{"text":"The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who \"most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes\u2014his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.\""}
{"text":"The publication of \"Beloved\" in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics\u2014including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams\u2014signed a letter of protest that was published in \"The New York Times Book Review\" on January 24, 1988. Yet later in 1988 \"Beloved\" did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award."}
{"text":"Since the late 1970s, the focus on Morrison's representation of African-American experience and history has been strong. The idea that writing acts as a means of healing or recovery is a strain in many of these studies. Timothy Powell, for instance, argues that Morrison's recovery of a Black logos rewrites blackness as \"affirmation, presence, and good\", while Theodore O. Mason, Jr., suggests that Morrison's stories unite communities."}
{"text":"Many critics explore memory, or what \"Beloved\"\u2019s Sethe calls \"rememory\", in this light. Susan Bowers places Morrison in a \"long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing\" that looks back in time, \"unveiling\" the horrors of the past in order to \"transform\" them. Several critics have interpreted Morrison's representations of trauma and memory through a psychoanalytic framework. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how \"primal scenes\" in Morrison's novels are \"an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory\" and \"rememory\". As Jill Matus argues, however, Morrison's representations of trauma are \"never simply curative\": in raising the ghosts of the past to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially \"provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission\"."}
{"text":"Ann Snitow's reaction to \"Beloved\" neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of \"Beloved\", Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is \"too light\" and \"hollow\", rendering the entire novel \"airless\". Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted \"Beloved\" in a different way, seeing something more complicated and burdened than a literal ghost, something requiring different forms of creative expression and critical interpretation. The conflicts at work here are ideological, as well as critical; they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African-American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation."}
{"text":"In defining Morrison's texts as African-American literature, critics have become more attentive to historical and social context and to the way Morrison's fiction engages with specific places and moments in time. As Jennings observes, many of Morrison's novels are set in isolated Black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant White culture, but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community. Matus comments that Morrison's later novels \"have been even more thoroughly focused on specific historical moments\"; \"through their engagement with the history of slavery and early twentieth-century Harlem, [they] have imagined and memorialized aspects of black history that have been forgotten or inadequately remembered\"."}
{"text":"On November 5, 2019, the \"BBC News\" listed \"Beloved\" on its list of the 100 most influential novels."}
{"text":"Tituba of Salem Village is a 1964 children's novel by African-American writer Ann Petry about the 17th-century West Indian slave of the same name who was the first to be accused of practicing witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials. Written for children 10 and up, it portrays Tituba as a black West Indian woman who tells stories about life in Barbados to the village girls. These stories are mingled with existing superstitions and half-remembered pagan beliefs on the part of Puritans, and the witchcraft hysteria is partly attributed to a sort of cabin fever during a particularly bitter winter. Petry's portrayal of the helplessness of women in that period, particularly slaves and indentured servants, is key to understanding her view of the Tituba legend."}
{"text":"Blood on the Forge is a migration novel by the African-American writer William Attaway set in the steel valley of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during 1919, a time when vast numbers of Black Americans moved northward. Attaway's own family was part of this population shift from South to North when he was a child."}
{"text":"His novel follows the Moss brothers as they escape the inequality of sharecropping in the South only to encounter inequality in the mills of the North. Their story illustrates the tragedy and hardships many Black Americans faced during the Great Migration. \"Blood on the Forge\" touches on themes such as the destruction of nature, the emptiness and hunger that the working characters experience, the complications of the individual in a depersonalized world, and the myth of the American Dream."}
{"text":"The novel opens in Kentucky, in the year 1919; sharecropping half-brothers Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody Moss are in dire straits. After their mule dragged their mother to her death, Big Mat killed the animal in a fit of rage. Now without a mule, the brothers are unable to work their land, and are likely to starve. The landowner, Mr. Johnston, agrees to give the brothers another mule."}
{"text":"When Big Mat goes to Mr. Johnston's riding boss to collect the mule he had been promised, the riding boss refuses to give him the mule, and makes a racist comment about the departed Mrs. Moss. Big Mat's anger again overcomes him and he attacks and possibly kills the riding boss. Earlier that day, Chinatown and Melody are visited by a white man on horseback who gives them a ten-dollar bill, promising much more if the brothers leave that night on a train that would take them North, to work. When Big Mat returns that evening and Melody and Chinatown tell him what the stranger said, Big Mat decides that he and his brothers will head North that very evening."}
{"text":"Part Two, the shortest of the novel, chronicles the inhumane conditions of the train in which the Moss brothers are shipped north to Pennsylvania."}
{"text":"The Moss brothers arrive at a mill town near Pittsburgh, where they get work in the steel mill and live together in a bunkhouse with the other workers of the mill. On their time off, Chinatown and Melody go to a Mexican madam named Sugar Mama, where they meet her niece Anna, whom Melody becomes infatuated with."}
{"text":"Chinatown and Melody convince Big Mat to come with them to a dog fight. When Anna rushes into the ring to prevent the death of one of the dogs, she is hit by the dog's owner. Big Mat responds by punching the man, which leads to a riot. After the fight breaks up, Anna rushes up to Big Mat and kisses him before running away again."}
{"text":"Big Mat takes Anna away from Sugar Mamma and sets up house with her in a small shack. Melody brings a letter from Big Mat's wife Hattie to the shack only to find Anna there alone. When he tells Anna about the letter she tries to snatch it from him; the two wrestle over the letter. The struggle culminates in Melody raping Anna."}
{"text":"There is a catastrophic accident at the mill that kills 14 men and blinds Chinatown. After this tragedy, the labor union becomes very active and gains many new members. The atmosphere of the town becomes increasingly hostile as the foreign mill workers come to resent the African American workers, who are the only group that refuse to join the union."}
{"text":"Big Mat is recruited by the sheriff, who is impressed with Big Mat's strength, to be a deputy and help combat the growing union. Once deputized, Mat is told that he is a boss in the town; after a lifetime of oppression, this new feeling of authority goes to Big Mat's head."}
{"text":"Melody decides to cheer Chinatown up after his accident by taking him to visit some prostitutes. Once at the brothel, Melody finds out that Anna has been working there. Melody returns home and tries to convince Anna to run away with him. When Big Mat overhears them, he once again is overpowered by his rage and beats Anna with his brass-studded belt."}
{"text":"Later that night Big Mat, along with the sheriff and his deputies, raid the union headquarters. In the midst of the action, Big Mat is repeatedly hit on the back of the head with a pickaxe handle by a young Slavic union member. Big Mat is killed by the blows."}
{"text":"The book ends with Melody and Chinatown leaving the mill town as they take a train to Pittsburgh, where they plan to rebuild their lives."}
{"text":"\"Blood on the Forge\" is an example of proletarian literature, a genre whose works usually represented the years surrounding the Great Depression. The experience of the characters in the novel mirror the class struggles during the Great Migration, specifically the hardships of African American workers during this period. The Moss brothers are realistically depicted as \"emerging black proletariat.\""}
{"text":"Edward E. Waldron claims that Big Mat represents \"the last side of the complete folk culture, religion, and an equally important tie to the soil. \" John Claborn asserts that while Melody and Chinatown become destroyed in the North, Big Mat \"thrives\" in his new home, as he, \"identifies more with the machines than with his fellow white workers, for they allow him to flourish in a way denied him by Jim Crow. \""}
{"text":"Chinatown is a younger half sibling to Big Mat. Chinatown resists sharecropping work, instead enjoying a lazy and carefree lifestyle on the Kentucky farm. Chinatown focuses on his own needs before those of the family, using his money on frivolous items such as a gold tooth. After leaving the farm, Chinatown, succumbing to the temptations offered by city life in Pennsylvania, becomes fascinated with drinking, gambling, and hiring prostitutes. Midway through the novel, Chinatown is left blind after an accident at the steel mill and is forced out of work and into the care of Big Mat and Melody. Phillip H. Vaughan argues that Chinatown's \"lazy, happy-go-lucky attitude reflects in part a psychological response to the subjugated position of the Negroes\" following the abolition of slavery."}
{"text":"Edward E. Waldron claims that Chinatown's main concern in life is to make himself unique, to be noticed as special; his gold tooth provides relief for this concern, and \"looking at the tooth shining back at him from his mirror image gives Chinatown a real sense of being somebody. \" Stacy I. Morgan claims that the tooth represents Chinatown's \"fragile sense of self-esteem,\" and that he \"fixes on the gold tooth as a way of struggling to affirm his individuality and humanity in the face of a socioeconomic system that would otherwise reduce him to a faceless sharecropper."}
{"text":"Melody, like Chinatown, is a younger half-sibling to Big Mat. Melody's most prominent characteristic is his love for music, which is expressed through his guitar playing. Once the brothers migrate to Pennsylvania, Melody is forced to work in the steel mills alongside his brothers; this harsh new way of life alienates Melody from his guitar, and he ceases to play. Melody develops feelings for Anna, despite her relationship with Big Mat, and tries to convince her to run away with him. According to Vaughan, Melody's blues singing \"recreates and sustains the pastoral myth... and an existence characterized by images of hunger, barrenness, and drudgery\"."}
{"text":"Hattie is Big Mat's wife. When the Moss Brothers travel North, Hattie is left behind pregnant. Big Mat receives a letter from Hattie saying that she fell and lost the baby."}
{"text":"Sugar Mama is a prostitute from \"Mex Town.\""}
{"text":"Anna is fourteen or fifteen years old and Sugar Mama's niece. Sugar Mama sent for Anna from New Mexico, thinking she would bring more business. At first, Anna tries to sleep with Melody, but when Big Mat defends Anna after an owner at the dog fight hits her, she becomes infatuated with Big Mat. Anna moves into a shack with Big Mat, where she endures his beatings."}
{"text":"Smothers is a crippled laborer. In an article published in \"MFS Modern Fiction Studies\", John Claborn claims that Smothers is \"a prophetic spokesman for the earth's pain.\" Claborn notes that Smother's legs have been mutilated in a violent steel mill incident, and claims that \"Smothers's shrill prophecies are the product of wisdom gained through suffering, of a heightened sense of what the ground feels as it is mined, smelted, and made into steel. \""}
{"text":"After Smothers dies in a mill accident, his co-workers memorialize him by turning the steel scraps from the accident into watch fobs, wearing these around their necks for luck."}
{"text":"The Moss brothers sharecrop on Mr. Johnson's land in Kentucky. Mr. Johnston had stopped giving the family food credit after Big Mat killed the mule Mr. Johnston had lent them, and claims the Moss family's share of the crop for the next two years to pay for the loss of the animal. However, Mr. Johnston wants to prevent the brothers from leaving to work in the North, so he tells Big Mat that he will give the Moss' a mule so that they can continue to work their land, and offers Melody and Chinatown work doing odd jobs around his farm."}
{"text":"Big Mat identifies the Kentucky riding boss as the son of a poor white sharecropper. When Big Mat goes to get the mule he was promised by Mr. Johnston, the riding boss, eager to exert his power, insults and whips Big Mat. Big Mat loses his temper and attacks the riding boss, prompting the brothers' departure to the north."}
{"text":"Bo is the \"boss of stove gang\" who catches Chinatown and Melody staring at the woman with the \"rotted\" breast. Bo points Chinatown and Melody in the right direction of the bunkhouse."}
{"text":"Mike is an Italian open-hearth worker who helps the brothers learn the ropes around the mill."}
{"text":"O'Casey is the diminutive pit boss in charge of the brothers' group at the mill."}
{"text":"Zanski is an old, Slavic laborer who works with the brothers in the pit and works at the lunch car with his granddaughter, Rosie. He's eventually fired from the mills."}
{"text":"Rosie is Zanski's granddaughter who waitresses at the lunch car. Later in the novel it is revealed that she also works as a prostitute."}
{"text":"There is something very timely in Attaway's implicit warning against the industry of the North, as Edward Margolies suggests in his introduction to the 1969 edition of the novel: possibly he [Attaway] saw his worst fears realized in the rapid spread industrial wastelands and the consequent plight of urban Negroes. From one point of view Attaway's feelings about the sanctity of nature now seem almost quaint in an age of cybernetics."}
{"text":"The Moss brothers idealize nature, looking back on their homeland of Kentucky with a certain pastoral fondness. Although the nature of the South is idealized, in both the North and the South nature is dying. In the South, Attaway highlights the overworked land, Big Mat's barren wife Hattie, the family\u2019s extreme hunger, and the drudgery of plowing all day with no reward. Likewise, the urban landscape of the North is also painted as dismal and dying. In the North, Attaway shows the defilement of natural landscape, evident \"in the pollution of the 'dirty-as-a-catfish-hole river with a beautiful name: the Monongahela,\" as well as the \"'mountains of red ore, yellow limestone, and black coke,' that line the river banks.\""}
{"text":"Attaway exposes the danger of destroying nature through the voice of the mill worker Smothers, who repeatedly warns his fellow workers of the destructive power of the machines. Though the workers seem to see Smothers' prophecies as merely \"half-mad, shrill rants,\" Claborn argues that \"Attaway goes out of his way to invest [Smothers] with a strange dignity and characterize him as a Tiresian speaker of truth. \" Smothers sees that destruction of nature \"can lead to can lead to industrial accidents, understood as the land avenging itself against humans. \""}
{"text":"Attaway depicts how African American sharecroppers were forcibly deprived of many of life's necessities. In Kentucky, the Moss brothers had to use newspapers attached to the wall in order to provide a bit of insulation, and they are so hungry that they chose to smoke or chew tobacco in an attempt to suppress their appetites. One way that they deal with this hunger is through music, and the novel opens with Melody playing the \"hungry blues\" on his guitar, which he hopes will distract his family members from their empty stomachs."}
{"text":"In an article published by \"Negro American Literature Forum\", Edward E. Waldron claims that Attaway depicts an intricate examination of the \"death of the blues\", or the death of folk culture, with the Moss brothers' move from the South to the North. The changes in Melody and Chinatown reflect the overall changes that southern blacks experienced in the Great Migration, as they have to leave their folk ways behind in order to survive their new, \"industrially-oriented environment.\""}
{"text":"Stacy I. Morgan also alludes to the ways in which the brothers' mind-set has shifted upon migrating to the North. Their vastly increased income in the North allows them new opportunities and multiple ways to spend their new capital, emphasizing instant gratification \""}
{"text":"Morgan also notes that the Moss brothers' fear in the train scene, during which their inability to see each other fills each brother with a terrifying sense of isolation, may be Attway's way of highlighting an issue that confronted many who moved during the Great Migration: the \"absence of material links to the family, community, and lifeways of former homes, which w[as] frequently demanded by the circumstances of the migration journey northward\u2014a journey that, for many African Americans, did necessarily commence under cover of night. \" Morgan asserts that with the absence of these links to their former selves, it was especially difficult for the migrants to retain any former cultural identity in their new homes."}
{"text":"One of the tragic outcomes in the novel, according to Klotman, is the loss of continuity in the lives of men who are almost human sacrifices to the industrial Moloch created by an unseen hand grasping for profits."}
{"text":"Claborn claims that Big Mat embodies the link between mechanic and racial violence. Once he is deputized, given power by the white law enforcement, and charged to \"suppress the white workers,\" he \"relishes the terror he inspires.\" Claborn notes that, \"once the strike begins and the furnaces start to cool down because there are not enough workers to keep them burning, Big Mat single-handedly tries to keep the machines functioning,\" and claims that this \"impossible effort\" shows that \"Big Mat has himself become a machine.\" \"Only as he dies [\u2026] does Big Mat glimpse the reality that, in siding with the mill owners and in becoming a machine, he has become an agent of oppression.\""}
{"text":"Myth of the American Dream and the working class."}
{"text":"Attaway's novel depicts how industrial technology dehumanizes working class laborers, alienates workers from the products of their labors, and also highlights how capitalism moved towards mechanized standardization and away from individualized artistry and craftsmanship."}
{"text":"Attaway's novels were not a major attraction to critics at their time of publication. Although Attaway's novels were received well, they have not been as critically acclaimed as other novels written during the 1940s, including \"The Grapes of Wrath\" (Steinbeck, 1939) and \"Native Son\" (Wright, 1941) which have both maintained an exceptional reputation for radical novels written during the Great Depression. Attaway did not continue writing novels after \"Blood on the Forge\", but instead went on to successfully write and produce songs, music and screenplays."}
{"text":"Mr. Potter (2002) is a novel by Antiguan born writer Jamaica Kincaid. It tells the story of a girl growing up without a father. When Mr. Potter, the father, died, a part of the girl (Elaine) died with him."}
{"text":"\"Abeng\" means an animal horn or musical instrument in the Twi language of the Akan people of Ghana."}
{"text":"The abeng has had two historical uses in Jamaica. It was used by slaveholders to summon slaves to the sugar fields. It was also used by the Maroon army as a method of communication. In a recent lecture at the University of St. Thomas, Cliff said that the title was a reference to both of these uses, though neither appears in the novel's text; they are referenced in the book's foreword. She further explained that the title is an attempt to \"take back\" Jamaican history."}
{"text":"The Crossover is a 2015 children's book by American author Kwame Alexander and the winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award Honor. The book, which is told entirely through verse, was first published in the United States in hardback on March 18, 2014 through HMH Books for Young Readers. The story follows two African-American twin brothers who share a love for basketball but find themselves drifting apart as they head into their junior high school year. They also run into many obstacles that they must overcome, like a girl who starts conflict between them, Alexis."}
{"text":"Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a 1976 novel by Mildred D. Taylor, sequel to her 1975 novella \"Song of the Trees\"."}
{"text":"The novel won the 1977 Newbery Medal. It is a central part of the Logan family saga which includes three sequels, \"Let the Circle Be Unbroken\" (1981), \"The Road to Memphis\" (1990), \"All the Days Past, All the Days to Come\" (2020) and a prequel, \"The Land\" (2001)."}
{"text":"The novel explores the struggles of African Americans in 1930s Southern Mississippi through the perspective of nine year old Cassie Logan. Taylor uses the novel to highlight several themes including Jim Crow segregation, Black landownership, sharecropping, the Great Depression and lynching."}
{"text":"Nine-year-old Cassie Logan is walking to school with her siblings Stacey (twelve years old), Christopher-John (seven years old), and Little Man,(six years old), in rural Mississippi. Cassie talks about the land which the Logan family lives on. It belonged to Harlan Granger, but he sold 2000 acres of it in 1886 to cover his taxes during Reconstruction. Their grandfather bought two hundred acres in 1887, then another two hundred acres in 1919."}
{"text":"At school, Cassie and Little Man notice that the books they use were originally in new condition distributed to the white kids, finally given to the black students once they're in bad condition. Their teacher Miss Crocker meets with Cassie's mother, Mary, who is also a teacher at the school. Mary calmly glues a piece of paper over the chart containing the racist information. She hands them back to a dumbstruck Crocker. That Saturday their father, David Logan, comes home from his railroad job in Louisiana, bringing with him L.T. Morrison to assist in planting, farming, protection, and other jobs, as Morrison was fired from the railroad for a fight that was the white men's fault. Papa leaves the next day to catch a train."}
{"text":"Outside, Cassie accidentally bumps into Lillian Jean Simms on the sidewalk. Lillian Jean orders her to get down in the road and apologize. Cassie tries running, but Lillian Jean's father twists her arm and throws her onto the road and orders her to apologize by calling her \"Miz Lillian Jean\" as though she were an adult. To Cassie's horror, her grandmother reluctantly enforces Mr. Simms's command, and she is forced to apologize."}
{"text":"When they get home, they find their uncle Hammer Logan from Chicago is visiting with a shiny silver Packard. Cassie tells him what happened and Hammer drives away seeking revenge, but is stopped and calmed by Mr. Morrison. Mama tells Stacey to get Mr. Morrison to stop Hammer because she is worried Hammer will be lynched for attacking a white family. She later finds him alive and unharmed."}
{"text":"Before going to church, Hammer gives Stacey an early Christmas present, a wool coat whose sleeves are too long. At church, T.J. teases Stacey about the coat, claiming the ill-fitting sleeves make it look \"like a fat preacher's coat\". Eventually, T.J. convinces Stacey to give him the coat, since it would fit him better. Mama is furious about this, but Uncle Hammer tells Stacey to let T.J. keep the coat."}
{"text":"Papa comes home for Christmas and is staying until spring. On Christmas night, Lillian Jean's younger brother Jeremy brings nuts for all the Logan children, as well as a handmade flute for Stacey. Papa warns Stacey to be careful about being friends with Jeremy, explaining that as he gets older, he may change and become as racist as the rest of his family. The next day, Papa calls the children into the barn, whips them and tells them never to go to the Wallace store again."}
{"text":"Time passes and Papa starts leading the boycott against the Wallaces' store. Mr. Jamison visits and Big Ma signs papers transferring the land to Papa and Hammer. Jamison also warns them to be careful, as they could still lose their land if they continue their boycott. Mr. Granger asks for the land again, but Papa still refuses. Hammer returns to Chicago."}
{"text":"Cassie makes \"peace\" with Lillian Jean, calling her \"Miz Lillian Jean\" and being her friend by carrying her books to and from school. As Lillian Jean begins trusting Cassie, she tells her all her own secrets, as well as those of her friends and brothers. Cassie eventually exacts her revenge by leading Lillian Jean into the woods, where she drops her books on the ground and starts taunting her. Lillian jean punches her and they fight. Cassie forces Lillian Jean to apologize for all the humiliation she inflicted on her, then threatens to reveal all of Lillian Jean's secrets if she tells anyone what happened."}
{"text":"T.J. is caught cheating again and fails for another year. He tells Mr. Wallace about the Logans' organized boycott of his store and how Mrs. Logan does not teach from the county-issued textbooks because she believes they contain biased information. Mr. Granger, Mr. Wallace, and a school board member fire Mrs. Logan on charges of teaching unapproved subjects. Stacey blames T.J., who denies it was his fault. As his black friends begin to shun him over this, T.J. turns to hanging out with Jeremy Simms' older brothers Melvin and R.W., who manipulate T.J. and mock him behind his back."}
{"text":"Papa, Mr. Morrison, and Stacey go to Vicksburg; on their way back, they find one of the wagon wheels has been tampered with. As Papa fixes it, they are ambushed by the Wallaces. They attempt to shoot Papa with a bullet that grazes his temple. However, this startles the horse into running off, causing the wagon to fall and crush Papa's leg. Mr. Morrison attacks the Wallaces, snapping Dewberry Wallace's back. Later, Mr. Granger uses his banking influence to make the Logans' mortgage note due for full payment within a week even though the Logans had four more years to pay it. Uncle Hammer sells his car and other items, allowing the Logans to pay their mortgage."}
{"text":"The sheriff arrests T.J. and Cassie realizes that Papa set the fire to save T.J. Stacey asks what T.J.'s fate will be. Papa replies that he will be convicted of Mr. Barnett's murder and may be executed. Cassie, overwhelmed by the news, silently goes to bed. Although Cassie never liked T.J., she cries for him and the land."}
{"text":"At the time of the book's publication, \"Kirkus Reviews\" wrote, \"Taylor trusts to her material and doesn't try to inflate Cassie's role in these events, and though the strong, clear-headed Logan family is no doubt an idealization, their characters are drawn with quiet affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human fallibility.\" In a retrospective essay about the Newbery Medal-winning books from 1976 to 1985, literary critic Zena Sutherland wrote of \"Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry\", \"There is no doubt that this book remains today as effective dramatically and as important sociologically as it was when it appeared... This is not an unflawed book, but it is a memorable one.\""}
{"text":"In addition to a Newbery Medal, the novel was also a National Book Award finalist and Coretta Scott King Award honoree."}
{"text":"The Burbank Unified School District banned the book from the curriculum due to complaints from four parents who allege the material in the book could lead to potential harm to the district's Black students."}
{"text":"In 1978, the novel was adapted into a television film directed by Jack Smight and starring Claudia McNeil, Janet MacLachlan and Morgan Freeman. The film won modest praise, including two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing."}
{"text":"Transcendent Kingdom is a novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in the United States on September 1, 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf (). \"Transcendent Kingdom\" was found in Literary Hub to have made 17 lists of the best books of 2020."}
{"text":"The novel follows 28-year-old Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience in her fifth year at Stanford University, and her Ghanaian-American mother, who is suffering from a deep depression."}
{"text":"While experimenting on lab mice for her research, Gifty gets a call that her mother is not feeling well. She sends for her mother so she can take care of her and is overwhelmed by the remembrance of the first time her mother fell into a similar depression, when Gifty was 11."}
{"text":"Gifty's mother and her father, affectionately nick-named The Chin-chin man, were Ghanaians who met and married late. They had a brilliant son, Nana, and after his birth Gifty's mother, seeking a better life for her child, relocated to Huntsville, Alabama where a cousin of hers was studying. Gifty's mother was forced to take menial jobs, eventually become a caretaker to abusive and racist elderly patients. Gifty's father eventually relocated to America to be with his family but was only able to find unstable work as a janitor."}
{"text":"Gifty was born a few years later, and was an unwanted pregnancy."}
{"text":"Nana's death and Gifty's mother's attempted suicide push Gifty away from religion. A bright scholar, she attends elite universities and chooses a path in neuroscience studying addictive behaviour. Her past and her continued belief in God mark her as an outsider and she has trouble opening herself up emotionally. In the present, unable to help her mother she finally reaches out to a colleague of hers who supports Gifty as she attempts to help her mother."}
{"text":"In an unspecified future time, after Gifty's mother has died of natural causes, a now married Gifty who is flourishing as a scientist and runs her own lab continues to attend church."}
{"text":"The book drew positive reviews upon publication. \"The Washington Post\" named it \"a book of blazing brilliance\". \"USA Today\" called it \"stealthily devastating\" while \"Vox\" gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars."}
{"text":"Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. It is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston's best known work. The novel explores main character Janie Crawford's \"ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny\"."}
{"text":"Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received. Since the late 20th century, it has been regarded as influential to both African-American literature and women's literature. \"TIME\" included the novel in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923."}
{"text":"Janie Crawford, an African-American woman in her forties, recounts her life starting with her sexual awakening, which she compares to a blossoming pear tree kissed by bees in spring. Around this time, Janie allows a local boy, Johnny Taylor, to kiss her, which Janie's grandmother, Nanny, witnesses."}
{"text":"As a young slave woman, Nanny was raped by her white owner, then gave birth to a mixed-race daughter she named Leafy. Though Nanny wanted a better life for her daughter and even escaped her jealous mistress after the American Civil War, Leafy was later raped by her school teacher and became pregnant with Janie. Shortly after Janie's birth, Leafy began to drink and stay out at night, eventually running away and leaving Janie with Nanny."}
{"text":"Nanny, having transferred her hopes for stability and opportunity from Leafy to Janie, arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older farmer looking for a wife. However, Killicks doesn't love Janie and wants only a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner; he thinks she doesn't do enough around the farm and considers her ungrateful. When Janie speaks to Nanny about her desire for love, Nanny, too, accuses Janie of being spoiled and, soon afterwards, dies."}
{"text":"Unhappy, disillusioned, and lonely, Janie leaves Killicks and runs off with Jody (Joe) Starks, a glib man who takes her to the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. Starks arranges to buy more land, establishes a general store, and is soon elected mayor of the town. However, Janie soon realizes that Starks wants her as a trophy wife to reinforce his powerful position in town and to run the store, even forbidding her from taking part in the town's social life. During their twenty-year marriage, he treats her as his property, criticizing her, controlling her, and physically abusing her. Finally, when Starks's kidney begins to fail, Janie says that he never knew her because he would not let her be free."}
{"text":"Suddenly, the area is hit by the great 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning and becomes increasingly jealous and unpredictable. When he tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, she fatally shoots him with a rifle in self-defense and is charged with murder."}
{"text":"At the trial, Tea Cake's black male friends show up to oppose her, but a group of local white women arrive to support Janie. After the all-white jury acquits Janie, she gives Tea Cake a lavish funeral. Tea Cake's friends forgive her, asking her to remain in the Everglades. However, she decides to return to Eatonville. As she expected, the residents gossip about her when she returns to town. The story ends where it started, as Janie finishes recounting her life to Pheoby."}
{"text":"Janie Crawford is the main character of \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\". At the beginning of the story, she is described as naive, beautiful, and energetic. However, as the story progresses, Janie is constantly under the influence and pressure of gender norms within her romantic relationships. As she navigates each of her relationships with men, Janie ultimately loses her confidence and self-image, conforming to roles that the husbands want her to fill."}
{"text":"Then, in Janie's second relationship, she left Logan Killicks in an attempt to pursue a better future with her new husband, Joe Starks. Joe was the Mayor of Eatonville and achieved incredible wealth, placing Janie in a higher status than her peers, since she was \"sleeping with authority, seating in a higher chair\". Janie believed that her life would change for the better. However, she was confined in the roles of a housewife and was made to be Joe's prized possession. \"The king's mule, and the king's pleasure is everything she is there for, nothing else\"."}
{"text":"In Janie's third and last relationship, she was able to experience true love, on her own terms, with her third husband Vergible \"Tea Cake\" Woods. Janie was older than Tea Cake by nearly twelve years. He loved and treated her better than her previous husbands. While she was no longer strictly confined by the gender roles placed upon her by her previous husbands, she was still easily influenced and manipulated by Tea Cake. Janie was forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake in self defense after he developed rabies."}
{"text":"Logan has traditional views on marriage. He believes that a man should be married to a woman, and that she should be his property and work hard. Everyone contributes to tending the family land. He believes Janie should work well from dawn to dusk, in the field as well as the house, and do as she is told. She is analogous to a mule or other working animal. He is not an attractive man by Janie's description of him and seems to be aware of this. As such, his prospects at finding a mate based on attraction and his age are slim, thus the reason for approaching Nanny early on about an arrangement of marriage to Janie when she comes of age."}
{"text":"During the course of their brief marriage, Logan attempts to subjugate Janie with his words and attempts to make her work beyond the gender roles in a typical marriage. He does not appreciate her streaks of independence when she refuses his commands and he uses her family history to try to manipulate her into being submissive to him. At one point, he threatens to kill her for her insubordination in a desperate and final attempt to control her."}
{"text":"Joe \"Jody\" Starks is Janie's second husband. He is charismatic, charming and has big plans for his future. Janie, being young and naive, is easily seduced by his efforts to convince her to leave Logan. Ultimately, Joe is successful in gaining Janie's trust and so she joins him on his journey. Joe views Janie as a princess or royalty to be displayed on a pedestal. Because of her youth, inexperience, and desire to find true love, Jody easily controls and manipulates her into submitting to his male authority."}
{"text":"Jody is a jealous man, and because of this he grows more and more possessive and controlling of Janie. He expects her to dress a certain way (buying her the finest of clothes, with tight corsets) and requires that she wear her long, beautiful hair\u2014symbolic of her free spirit and femininity\u2014 covered and up in a bun, so as not to attract too much unwanted attention from the other men in Eatonville. He considers her long hair to be for his enjoyment alone. He excludes her from various events and the social gatherings in Eatonville to further his dominance and control over her. He restricts her from being friendly with the other townswomen, requiring her to behave in a separate and superior manner."}
{"text":"However, Tea Cake shows tendencies of patriarchal dominance and psychological abuse towards Janie. He isn't always truthful with her and shows some of the same characteristic traits exhibited by Joe Starks and Logan Killicks. For instance, he keeps her from working with the rest of the people down on the muck because he believes she is above common folk. Consequently, until Janie asserts herself with Tea Cake and joins the others in working, she gains a bit of a reputation for thinking herself better than everyone else."}
{"text":"In a show of male dominance in their relationship, Tea Cake takes $200 from Janie without her knowledge or permission and spends it on a nice guitar and a lavish party with others around town without including her in the festivities. While accounting for his spending of her money, he tells Janie that he had to pay women that he deemed unattractive $2 each to keep them from the party. He then gambles the remaining amount to make the money back and excludes her from the gambling scene. What differentiates him from Joe in this regard is that Janie regularly confronts him and he acquiesces to her demand that she not be excluded from aspects of his life."}
{"text":"Another tendency that Tea Cake shares with Joe is his jealousy and need to maintain some amount of control over Janie. When he overhears another woman speaking poorly to Janie about Tea Cake and attempting to set her up with her brother, Tea Cake decides to take matters into his own hands. First, he discusses with Janie, a conversation he overheard between her and Mrs. Turner, a local caf\u00e9 owner. He criticizes Mrs. Turner's appearance (like Janie, she is mixed-race) and then successfully executes an elaborate plan to ruin her establishment. Finally, he slaps Janie around in front of Mrs. Turner and others to show them that he is in charge and to assert his ownership over her."}
{"text":"In the end, Tea Cake plays the role of hero to Janie when he saves her from drowning and being attacked by a rabid dog. Tea Cake himself is bitten and eventually succumbs to the disease. Not able to think rationally and enraged with jealousy, he physically attacks Janie and she is forced to shoot and kill Tea Cake. Therefore, she effectively ends her emotional attachment to the men in her life and the desire to seek out and realize her dream of true love."}
{"text":"Janie does not find complete independence as a woman until after the death of Tea Cake. She returns to Eatonville with her hair down and she sits on her own porch chatting with her friend Pheoby. By the end of the novel, she has overcome traditional roles and cultivates an image of the \"liberated black woman.\""}
{"text":"Throughout the novel, Hurston vividly displays how African American women are valued, or devalued, in their marital relationships. By doing so, she takes the reader on a journey through Janie's life and her marriages. Janie formed her initial idea of marriage off the beautiful image of unity she witnessed between a pear tree and a bee. This image and expectation sets Janie up for disappointment when it came time to marry. From her marriage to Logan Killicks to Tea Cake, Janie was forced to acknowledge where she stood as a powerless female in her relationship."}
{"text":"Hurston wrote \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" while living in Belle Glade, at the home of Harvey Poole, who, as manager of one of the local labor camps, informed her tremendously about bean picking, and the labors of African-Americans on the muckland. The book was also written while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Haiti to research Obeah practices in the West Indies."}
{"text":"Hurston's political views in \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" were met with resistance from several leading Harlem Renaissance authors."}
{"text":"Novelist and essayist Richard Wright condemned \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\", writing in a review for \"New Masses\" (1937): Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction\u2026 [She] can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley... Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears."}
{"text":"Ralph Ellison said the book contained a \"blight of calculated burlesque.\""}
{"text":"Alain Locke wrote in a review: \"when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly\u2014which is Miss Hurston's cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?\""}
{"text":"\"The New Republic\"s Otis Ferguson wrote: \"it isn't that this novel is bad, but that it deserves to be better\". But he went on to praise the work for depicting \"Negro life in its naturally creative and unselfconscious grace\"."}
{"text":"Not all African-American critics had negative things to say about Hurston's work. Carter G. Woodson, founder of \"The Journal of Negro History\" wrote, \"\"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" is a gripping story... the author deserves great praise for the skill and effectiveness shown in the writing of this book.\" The critic noted Hurston's anthropological approach to writing, \"She studied them until she thoroughly understood the working of their minds, learned to speak their language\"."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, reviews of Hurston's book in the mainstream white press were largely positive, although they did not translate into significant retail sales. Writing for \"The New York Times\", Ralph Thompson states: \"the normal life of Negroes in the South today\u2014the life with its holdovers from slave times, its social difficulties, childish excitements, and endless exuberances... compared to this sort of story, the ordinary narratives of Negroes in Harlem or Birmingham seem ordinary indeed.\""}
{"text":"For the \"New York Herald Tribune\", Sheila Hibben described Hurston as writing \"with her head as with her heart\" creating a \"warm, vibrant touch\". She praised \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" as filled with \"a flashing, gleaming riot of black people, with a limitless sense of humor, and a wild, strange sadness\"."}
{"text":"\"New York Times\" critic Lucille Tompkins described \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\": \"It is about Negroes... but really it is about every one, or at least every one who isn't so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory.\""}
{"text":"As universities across the country developed Black Studies programs in the 1970s and 1980s, they created greater space for Black literature in academia. Several prominent academics, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Addison Gayle, Jr., established a new \"Black Aesthetic\" that \"placed the sources of contemporary black literature and culture in the communal music and oral folk tradition\". This new respect coupled with a growing Black feminism led by Mary Helen Washington, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and others would create the space for the rediscovery of Hurston."}
{"text":"Hurston first achieved a level of mainstream institutional support in the 1970s. Walker published an essay, \"Looking for Zora\", in \"Ms.\" magazine in 1975. In that work, she described how the Black community's general rejection of Hurston was like \"throwing away a genius\". The National Endowment for the Humanities went on to award Robert Hemenway two grants for his work to write Hurston's biography. The 1977 biography was followed in 1978 by the re-issue of \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\"."}
{"text":"In 1975, the Modern Language Association held a special seminar focusing on Hurston. In 1981 professor Ruth Sheffey of Baltimore's Morgan State University founded the Zora Neale Hurston Society. Hurston had attended the school, then known as Morgan Academy, in 1917."}
{"text":"In 1978, Harper and Row leased its rights to \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" to the University of Illinois Press. However, the printing was so profitable that Harper and Row refused to renew the leasing contract and instead reprinted its own new edition. This new edition sold its total print of 75,000 in less than a month."}
{"text":"The \"New York Times\"s Virginia Heffernan explains that the book's \"narrative technique, which is heavy on free-indirect discourse, lent itself to poststructuralist analysis\". With so many new disciplines especially open to the themes and content of Hurston's work, \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" achieved growing prominence in the last several decades. It is now firmly established in the literary canon."}
{"text":"On November 5, 2019, the \"BBC News\" listed \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" on its list of the 100 most influential novels."}
{"text":"In a conversation with Jody, Janie defends 'womenfolk,' disagreeing with the sexist claim that God made men \"different\" because they turn \"out so smart\" (70). When she states that men \"don't know half as much as you think you do,\" Jody interrupts her saying, 'you getting too moufy Janie... Go fetch me de checker-board and de checkers' (70\u201371) so that he and the other men could play (Bernard 9)."}
{"text":"Oreo is a satirical novel published in 1974 by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor. The novel, addressing issues of a mixed heritage child, was considered \"before its time\" and went out of print until Harryette Mullen rediscovered the novel and brought it out of obscurity."}
{"text":"The book has since acquired cult classic status."}
{"text":"Ross uses the structure of the Theseus myth to both trap Oreo and allow her to reinvent it. Oreo's white father, who abandoned her, forces her to live out this inherently white, male narrative. However, the trope of lost patriarchy is essential in black cultures so Oreo can reappropriate the myth and make it entirely non-foreign. Furthermore, Oreo reinvents the archaic myth by living a black narrative through it, suggesting that blacks can reappropriate themes from the white culture they are forced to live in. The search for paternity within the Theseus myth is essentially futile since Oreo gains nothing from finding her father, which undermines the importance placed on the search for paternity."}
{"text":"\"Oreo\" is a picaresque novel, that revolves around our picaroon, Oreo. It is a fictional tale about the adventures and conflicts she faces on her search for her father. It falls under the category of Post Soul Aesthetic, modern works that expands upon the possibilities of the Black experience, and arguably New Black Aesthetic, works that describes the black experience from the perspective of the culturally-hybrid, second generation middle class. The comedic style of the novel helps to subvert the trope of the \"tragic mulatto\" and position Oreo as a \"thriving hybrid.\""}
{"text":"The novel is told from the perspective of an omniscient, third-person. The novel strays from traditional narrative form. The novel exemplifies the essence of postmodernism, fragmentation through its structure.The chapters are broken into subsections. The novel uses diagram, equations, menus, tests, ads, letters, other sources to break and supplement the narrative."}
{"text":"Ross employs different narrative structures throughout the course of the novel. Mainly, the episodic nature of the book is similar to the picaresque story structure. The charisma and wits of Christine, especially in contrast to the foolishness of characters like Parnell or even her father, exemplify the use of this narrative. Elements of the bildungsroman are also present, such as the contrast of the cultures of Christine's upbringing in Philadelphia compared to that of New York."}
{"text":"Most notably, \"Oreo\" draws heavily upon the Theseus myth, so much so that a quick reading guide at the end of the book summarizes the story's events in terms of the myth. The names of the novel's chapters are also references to the Greek myth."}
{"text":"While the novel is told from a third person omniscient point-of-view, there was a strong and deliberate choice to have the reader still be limited in fully understanding what goes through Christine's mind. While her journey is fun and adventurous, Christine runs into certain situations in the novel that can be viewed as traumatic. For example, her near-rape at the hands of Parnell and her viewing of her father's accident are both very extreme events that elicit immediate and raw emotion, yet the reader does not get that from Christine. The reader never gets to go deeper into Christine's mind and is never let in to her true feelings about the journey that she takes to find her father."}
{"text":"Ross brings to the forefront new figures that are usually not represented in talks of Black identity. In Oreo she presents the characters of Jimmie C., the feeble-hearted, fainting nerd, Jimmie's best friend, Fonzelle Scarsdale, a hyper-sexualized F-student with a choreographed heavy walk, the flamboyantly dressed pimp, Parnell, and Kirk the sexual beast with an oversized phallus."}
{"text":"The novels uses a broad spectrum of languages, including African American vernacular, Yiddish, superstandard language, louise-ese, math, rhyme, singing. Christine's skillful navigation among this broad array of languages points to her cultural hybridity. She is capable of code-switching and interchanging, and communicating with all these languages and their users."}
{"text":"Oreo can also be viewed as searching for her identity, since she feels that neither \"Jewish\" nor \"Black\" fully define her experience. Oreo is in multiple spaces where others assume her identity and treat her according to their assumptions. Oreo never had the opportunity to immerse herself into both of her racial designations, and she believed that finding her father would give her the missing piece of her identity. She was trying to transcend race and find her individual identity."}
{"text":"Upon its republication by Northeastern University Press in 2000, the then nearly thirty-year-old novel was praised for being ahead of its time. \"Oreo\" has been hailed as \"one of the masterpieces of 20th century American comic writing.\" Furthermore, one critic elaborated that \"Oreo\" was \"a true twenty-first century novel.\" The novel's \"wit is global, hybrid and uproarious ... simultaneously irreverent, appropriative and serious. It is post-everything: post-modern, post-identity politics, post-politically correct.\" Novelist Paul Beatty also included an excerpt of \"Oreo\" in his 2006 anthology of African-American humor \"Hokum\". In June 2007, Cultural critic Jalylah Burrell listed the book on VIBE.com as the number one work in African-American literature that should be adapted into a major motion picture, writing, \"Quirky comedy with surrealist elements, i.e., Wes Anderson meets Kaufman\/Gondry.\""}
{"text":"The novel was adapted by Adam Davenport into a screenplay intended as a starring vehicle for Keke Palmer. The project is yet to be produced."}
{"text":"Erasure is a 2001 novel by Percival Everett and originally published by UPNE. The novel reacts against the dominant strains of discussion surrounding the publication and criticism of African American literature."}
{"text":"Erasure is about a writer dealing with death, murder, and growing old. The novel's plot revolves around many things, but is essentially about the consequences of turning one's art into a simple commodity; i.e. giving into market forces. The market force within Erasure mirrors the late-90s reality around how the publishing industry pigeon-holed Black writers, and centered or valued certain experiences [those of the urban poor] over others. Themes around race, class, loyalty to family, sex, the theory of language, the life of canonical western artists, abortion, and sexual identity are also explored as the novel unfolds."}
{"text":"Like many Everett novels, \"Erasure\" is experimental in structure. Part of the novel's structure involves the multiple embedded narratives, written by the main character Thelonious \"Monk\" Ellison, including his mock-novel titled \"My Pafology\". \"The Guardian\" described as a \"skilful, extended parody of ghetto novels such as Sapphire's \"Push\".\" The novel includes other narrative styles within the larger narrative frame, including an academic paper, personal letters, story ideas, imagined dialogue between fictionalized historical characters, and, in the final section, the end of \"Erasure\" as written by Stagg R Leigh, Monk's alter ego."}
{"text":"The novel was well received. \"The Guardian\" focused on the dark comedy that it represents, describing it as moving towards \"bleakest comedy\" and \"sly work.\" Ready Steady Book focused more on the novel being \"full of anger\" about the African American literary establishment, but describes the most redeeming elements of the plot coming from \" moving portrait of a son coming to terms with his mother\u2019s life.\""}
{"text":"The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a 1971 novel by Ernest J. Gaines. The story depicts the struggles of African Americans as seen through the eyes of the narrator, a woman named Jane Pittman. She tells of the major events of her life from the time she was a young slave girl in the American South at the end of the Civil War."}
{"text":"The novel was dramatized in a TV movie in 1974, starring Cicely Tyson."}
{"text":"Some people have asked me whether or not \"The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\" is fiction or nonfiction. It is fiction. When Dial Press first sent it out, they did not put \"a novel\" on the galleys or on the dustjacket, so a lot of people had the feeling that it could have been real. ... I did a lot of research in books to give some facts to what Miss Jane could talk about, but these are my creations. I read quite a few interviews performed with former slaves by the WPA during the thirties and I got their rhythm and how they said certain things. But I never interviewed anybody."}
{"text":"The book was made into an award-winning television movie, \"The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\", broadcast on CBS in 1974. The film holds importance as one of the first made-for-TV movies to deal with African-American characters with depth and sympathy. It preceded the ground-breaking television miniseries \"Roots\" by three years. The film culminates with Miss Pittman joining the civil rights movement in 1962 at age 110. Critics have noted the language to be difficult to understand by viewers not familiar with the dialect and accent of the characters."}
{"text":"The movie was directed by John Korty; the screenplay was written by Tracy Keenan Wynn and executive produced by Roger Gimbel. It starred Cicely Tyson in the lead role, as well as Michael Murphy, Richard Dysart, Katherine Helmond and Odetta. The film was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and was notable for its use of very realistic special effects makeup by Stan Winston and Rick Baker for the lead character, who is shown from ages 23 to 110. The television movie is currently distributed through Classic Media. The film won nine Emmy Awards in 1974 including Best Actress of the Year, Best Lead Actress in a Drama, Best Directing in a Drama, and Best Writing in Drama."}
{"text":"Joy (1990) is a novel by Marsha Hunt about the relationship between two African-American women that is based on secrets, lies and delusion. Mainly set in a posh New York apartment in the course of one day in the spring of 1987, the novel contains frequent flashbacks that describe life in a black neighbourhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The book also deals with stardom in the music business and some people's inability, despite their riches, to make their own American Dream come true and to lead fulfilled lives."}
{"text":"The first person narrator of the novel is Palatine Ross, a 70-year-old cleaning woman originally from New Orleans, whose childhood is dominated by poverty and loss."}
{"text":"Shutting her eyes to all the evil in the world and firmly relying on God and the words of the Bible as guidance, Palatine tries to raise Joy and her sisters to be educated, honest and religious members of society. The fact that, growing up in a rough neighbourhood, the not-yet-teenaged girls are very early in their lives confronted with sex willingly escapes her notice. It troubles Palatine a great deal when Dagwood, her neighbour's new boyfriend, starts spending the night with the girls' mother. One morning during the summer vacation, while his girlfriend is at work and Palatine is taking care of the children, Dagwood stays on in the apartment."}
{"text":"Right from the start, Palatine tries to take the three girls along to church, seeing that their blaspheming mother will never do so. Time and again, in the course of more than twenty years, Palatine tries to convince Joy that finding herself a nice coloured boyfriend whom she could marry and have children with would be the right thing to do. However, \"Chocolate Chip\" remains a one-hit wonder after an interview given by Brenda to some gay magazine in which she announces her coming out as a lesbian."}
{"text":"However, rather than being able to mourn Joy's death, she for the first time learns things about Joy which finally force her to abandon her blinkered view of her \"God-sent child\" and admit that she was a sinner rather than a saint."}
{"text":"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, by the African-American writer Ishmael Reed, is a satirical take on the traditional Western. It is Ishmael Reed's second novel, following \"The Freelance Pallbearers\" (1967), and was first published in 1969. It tells the story of the Loop Garoo Kid, an African-American cowboy who practices the religion of Neohoodooism, and describes his struggle against established religion and cultural oppression."}
{"text":"\"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down\" is a western that spans some three centuries of history and references locations from across the United States landscape. Through the three colorful protagonists, Chief Showcase, a Native American, Drag Gibson, a white land capitalist, and the Loop Garoo Kid, an African-American cowboy, Reed criticizes the hypocrisy of the American Church, the warping of history to degrade the portrayal of African Americans, and ways the \"white man\" attempts to destroy the \"black man\"."}
{"text":"\"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down\" jumps into the narrative of the main protagonist, Loop Garoo, a black, silver tongued, circus cowboy, who represents the devil to the white men. The circus troupe heads into Yellow Back Radio, a sparsely populated ghost town overtaken by a child population in Indian garb. The circus troupe and the children are massacred by the adults that were chased out by the children, while Loop Garoo escapes with his life and a desire for vengeance. Drag Gibson, a homosexual and influential land-owner who is head of the city, is also introduced."}
{"text":"As Drag deals with the problems from a deteriorating city, Loop Garoo is saved from being eaten by wild animals by Chief Showcase, a Native American who fights his oppressors through suave and underhanded means. Loop begins his Hoodoo curses on Drag, giving him the retroactive itch and other inconveniences, as the conflict builds."}
{"text":"Drag murders his sixth wife and orders his seventh through the mail-order service. Her name is Mustache Sal, a nymphomaniac who seeks to murder Drag to inherit his vast fortunes. She proceeds to have sex with just about every main and minor male character, showing a complete lack of discrimination. As Drag continues into a progressively more deteriorating state of mind because of the uncontrollable loss of power and influence around him, Loop Garoo continues to gain influence through his appearance in town, soundly whipping the marshal and pushing the Preacher into the brink of insanity."}
{"text":"The Loop Garoo Kid is an African-American cowboy and Neohoodoo houngan. He combats the imperialism and monopolistic greed of Drag Gibson and organized religion, casting spells and summoning Loa to assist him. His struggle against Gibson symbolizes his fight against the power structure and repressive elements of white culture. He embodies African-American culture and religion; his art is as diverse and adaptable as the Hoodoo rituals he performs. Loop Garoo is the apocryphal brother of Jesus Christ, the love interest of the Virgin Mary, and the high priest of Neohoodooism."}
{"text":"Drag Gibson is an influential landowner who represents the impact of white culture on the West, the rapacious greed of land capitalists, and the rigidity of Judeo-Christian values. He rules the town of Yellow Back Radio from his ranch house with a small army of ranch hands. A blatant racist with no regard for human life, he kills off a total of seven wives by the end of the novel. Drag clashes with Loop Garoo and Neohoodooism until he is finally eaten by Yellow Back Radio's steel-jawed hogs."}
{"text":"Chief Showcase is the last surviving Native-American in the Yellow Back Radio region. After Drag Gibson slaughtered his tribe, he began writing militant poetry about white imperialism. Reed portrays Showcase as spiritual and advanced - he travels in a helicopter that confuses and terrifies his provincial white adversaries. Showcase fights back against his oppressors by playing both sides of an escalating conflict between Drag Gibson and the powers in Washington, D.C., working to stir up trouble between the powerful Western landowner and the greedy Federal Government."}
{"text":"Zozo Labrique is a Hoodoo mambo who travelled with Loop Garoo's circus. She taught Loop Garoo connaissance, or Hoodoo magic, and was killed by Drag Gibson's cowhands when they burned down the circus. She reappears in the novel as a Loa called upon by Loop Garoo during his summoning ritual."}
{"text":"Mustache Sal is Drag Gibson's nymphomaniac mail-order bride. She marries Drag with the intention of poisoning him and inheriting his land, but he discovers her plan and feeds her to the executioner's steel-jawed hogs. In contrast to the Black Cougar Saloon's Hurdy Gurdy girls and Drag's previous wife, The Horrible Hybrid, Mustache Sal displays independence, intelligence, and open-mindedness. She doesn't discriminate racially in her personal associations, consorting with Loop Garoo, the ranch hands, and Chief Showcase alike."}
{"text":"Reverend Boyd is the Protestant minister of Yellow Back Radio. He tries to connect with the youth of the town, hosting light shows for them, but his efforts fail. He turns to alcohol for comfort and is ridiculed by Loop Garoo and Pope Innocent. He is killed by the Pope with a can of DDT-based insecticide."}
{"text":"Field Marshal Theda Doompussy Blackwell is a member of the U.S. military brass who schemes with Chief Showcase to take control of Drag Gibson's land. Reed portrays the Field Marshal as weak, petulant, and possibly homosexual, poking fun at the typically virile stereotype of the military man."}
{"text":"Reed interweaves the basic tenets of a religious aesthetic called Neohoodooism throughout the text. He achieves this chiefly through the statements of the Loop Garoo Kid, the spiritual high priest of Neohoodooism. The religious side of Neohoodooism has its roots in the African-American folk magic of Hoodoo, which Reed claims is based on the West African religion of Vodoun. Loop Garoo's summoning of various Loa and hexing of Drag Gibson confirms these religious roots."}
{"text":"Neohoodooism is also an artistic aesthetic which values multicultural hybridism. The Loop Garoo Kid uses Neohoodooism to fight Drag Gibson, a symbol of the intolerance in white culture. Their battle represents the struggle of an inclusive African-American culture against a rigid Judeo-Christian one."}
{"text":"Reed explains that he linked the religious and aesthetic aspects of Neohoodooism together because the one is a metaphor for the other; both aspects are essentially amalgamations: \"Voodoo is the perfect metaphor for the multicultural. Voodoo comes out of the fact that all these different tribes and cultures were brought from Africa and Haiti. All of their mythologies, knowledges, and herbal medicines, their folklores, jelled. It's an amalgamation like this country.\""}
{"text":"\"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down\" was received with varied criticisms: \"Neil Schmitz, in an essay on Reed's fiction in \"Twentieth Century Literature\" (April 1974), judged \"Yellow Back Radio\" \"to exhibit a 'simplistic' focus and 'diffused' energy, although many readers found it to be a comic tour de force.\""}
{"text":"\"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down\" has been cited as an important precursor or model for the 1974 satirical Western film \"Blazing Saddles\", a connection that Reed himself has made."}
{"text":"\"Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down\" was rated one of the 100 Best Books in the 20th Century by the \"American Book Review\" and a \"San Francisco Chronicle\" poll."}
{"text":"The Salt Eaters is a 1980 novel, the first such work by Toni Cade Bambara. The novel is written in an experimental style and is explicitly political in tone, with several of the characters being veterans of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It is set in the fictional town of Claybourne, Georgia."}
{"text":"The novel opens on Minnie Ransom, the \"fabled healer of the district\", performing a healing on Velma Henry who has attempted suicide by slitting her wrists and sticking her head into a gas oven. Velma, a community activist who has worked in various leftist movements, has suffered a nervous breakdown due to the increasing factionalism in the activist community of Claybourne as well as her failing marriage to Obie, another activist, and the pressures of her job as a computer programmer at Transchemical, a chemical plant in the neighboring town."}
{"text":"The entirety of the novel's action revolves around the healing, with the planning of the upcoming Spring Festival serving as backdrop. The point-of-view of the novel shifts numerous times between characters. \"At once spiritual, apocalyptic, mysterious, cacophonic, and destabilizing, \"The Salt Eaters\" offers a unifying epiphany of creation and community.\""}
{"text":"The Between (1995) is the first novel by writer Tananarive Due. It was nominated for the"}
{"text":"A middle-class African American couple's life is shattered when the wife begins receiving death threats. The husband begins to experience an alternative reality so real he has trouble grasping which is real. His psychiatrist diagnosis him as a latent schizophrenic. The family must decide if its schizophrenia, are the dreams a cosmic death threat or has the husband become unstuck from this reality and become stuck between worlds."}
{"text":"Part horror novel, part detective story and part speculative fiction, \"The Between\" is a mix of genres. Yet it is no hybrid. It is a finely honed work that always engages and frequently surprises. <br>-- JAMES POLK, \"The New York Times\""}
{"text":"The lengthy autobiographical essay by Due elucidates the history and context of her first novel \"The Between\" among many other works and details of her life. Due also subtly suggests the horrifying thought that pervades the story but is left tactfully unspoken: if each of us creates our own reality, then ultimately we are all alone in the world."}
{"text":"On the Come Up, published on February 5, 2019 by Balzer + Bray, is a young adult novel by Angie Thomas . It tells the story of Bri, a sixteen-year old rapper hoping to fill the shoes of her father and 'make it' as an underground hip-hop legend. Overnight, Bri becomes an internet sensation after posting a rap hit which sparks controversy. As Bri defeats the odds to 'make it' she battles controversy to achieve her dreams. It is set in the same universe (Garden Heights) as Thomas' first book \"The Hate U Give\"."}
{"text":"The book was well reviewed by The New York Times, Vox, and The Washington Post."}
{"text":"The American Library Association named the book one of the best released for young adults in 2020."}
{"text":"\"On the Come Up\" received several accollades:"}
{"text":"On February 4, 2019, Fox 2000 Pictures acquired the rights to adapt the novel with George Tillman Jr. directing and producing with Robert Teitel, and Jay Marcus from State Street Pictures, alongside Thomas Marty Bowen, Isaac Klausner and John Fischer of Temple Hill Entertainment. On December 11, 2019, after Disney acquisition of 21st Century Fox and closing of Fox 2000, Paramount Players acquired the film adaptation with Kay Oyegun hired to write the script and Tillman Jr. still attached to direct. On October 19, 2020, Wanuri Kahiu replaced Tillman Jr. as director of the film."}
{"text":"If He Hollers Let Him Go is the first novel by American writer Chester Himes, published in 1945, about an African-American shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II. It earned him critical acclaim and was considered a \"protest novel\", in the tradition of Richard Wright."}
{"text":"The book was adapted as a 1968 film, starring Raymond St. Jacques, Dana Wynter, Kevin McCarthy, Barbara McNair, and Arthur O'Connell. The screenplay differed markedly from the novel."}
{"text":"The story spans four days in the life of Robert \"Bob\" Jones, a newcomer to Los Angeles from Ohio. With some college education, he works as a crew leader in a naval shipyard. In this period, black workers are gaining opportunities in the defense industry as a result of executive orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II."}
{"text":"However, Jones cannot escape the pressures of racism. He believes he was promoted as a supervisor only to gain the cooperation of black workers in the war effort. He is forced to deal with anti-communist paranoia, resentment from whites on the floor working at the same jobs as \"colored boys\", and the baiting of black workers by some white females."}
{"text":"His fears invade his dreams, aspirations, and passions. His dream of making something of himself in California is jeopardized as he reacts to the actions of the white people around him. He struggles to contain his urges to fight, kill, and rape as ways to overcome his resentment of white power arrayed against him."}
{"text":"The main characters are the protagonist, Bob Jones, and two women: Madge Perkins, who is white; and Alice Harrison, his higher-class African-American girlfriend. Bob struggles for place in a white-dominated world and is filled with violent thoughts against white people, but does not act on them."}
{"text":"In what is described as a \"sexually charged novel\", Madge makes a racial slur toward Bob. His calling her a \"bitch\" results in his demotion. He considers raping her as a way to get back at white America, seeing her as a symbol of \"whiteness\", but when she expresses sexual attraction to him, he rejects her. Alice tells Bob it is no use getting angry about the inequality that blacks must live with, and he has to learn to deal with it."}
{"text":"Themes addressed in the novel include racism suffered by blacks, color differentiation among African Americans (Alice's light skin is associated with her higher class), employment discrimination against blacks, and class divisions among whites and blacks. Communism is featured generously, as the Communist unionists (\"agitators\") are the only ones who talk about the issue of race in any way with which the protagonist agrees. There is some reference to jazz."}
{"text":"The novel is referred to in Frantz Fanon's book, \"Black Skin White Masks\" (1952), first published in French, in the chapter titled \"The Fact of Blackness\"."}
{"text":"Critics praised this first novel by Himes, classifying it in the \"protest novel\" tradition established by Richard Wright."}
{"text":"Brown Girl, Brownstones is the debut novel by the internationally recognized writer Paule Marshall, first published in 1959, and dramatized by CBS Television Workshop in 1960. The story is about Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn, New York. The book gained further recognition after it was reprinted in 1981 by the Feminist Press."}
{"text":"Book 1. A Long Day and a Long Night."}
{"text":"Ten-year-old Selina Boyce lives in a brownstone in Brooklyn with her Barbadian immigrant family: her mother Silla, father Deighton, and sister Ina. Silla is a strict, no-nonsense woman whose goal is to save enough money to purchase the brownstone they are leasing. Deighton is lackadaisical, impulsive, and he frequently cheats on his wife. His dreams of returning to Barbados and his frivolousness are a source of tension between Silla and him. Deighton inherits a piece of land; Silla wants him to sell it so they can buy the brownstone, but Deighton has fantasies about moving back and building an extravagant house. Suggie Skeete, Miss Mary, and Miss Thompson are a few other characters who appear sporadically; Selina goes to them for companionship and advice."}
{"text":"Book 2 opens with a brief description of Deighton and Silla's drawn-out argument over selling the piece of land, and Selina imagining herself as one of the sleeping children who lived in the brownstone before the Boyces. Selina starts to think about womanhood and growing up. She goes to the park with her friend Beryl, where they have an argument about how babies are born: c-section or vaginal birth. Beryl confides to Selina that she has started menstruating. Selina is confused and somewhat repulsed by the idea, as she believes it will never happen to her. In reality, Selina feels left out and confused by puberty."}
{"text":"World War II is in progress at the start of the third book; this section spans a few years, beginning when Selina is around eleven and ends when she is fifteen. Book 3 is titled \"The War\" partially in reference to the war, but also in reference to the continuing argument between Silla and Deighton about his piece of land. A group of a few other Bajan women visits Silla in her kitchen while she makes Barbadian cuisine to sell. She vents her frustrations about the land, but she comes with a plan that will get it taken care of. Selina overhears, and Silla threatens to punish her if she tells her father."}
{"text":"Selina searches for someone she can tell about Silla's plans because she wants to protect her father. Deighton, still jobless, begins to devote his time to studying the trumpet. He believes that music will be his next get-rich-quick scheme. Selina tells him about the conversation Silla had with the other Bajan women and her plans to somehow sell the land, but reassures him that it's probably nothing to worry about. She fights with her sister, feeling ignored and unloved. Ina says that no one will ever like her because of her bold and brash personality."}
{"text":"Selina tells Miss Thompson about her fight and her concerns about her mothers plans. Miss Thompson, being a maternal and nurturing person, tries to help by distracting her. She fixes Selina's hair in curls, then Selina heads to her mother's work with the intention of confronting her about her plans to sell the land behind Deighton's back. Silla chastises her for travelling to the part of town by herself at night."}
{"text":"Silla reveals that she has successfully sold Deighton's land for nine hundred dollars. Over the course of a year, Silla forged letters to Deighton's sister and granted his sister the power of attorney to sell the land. Deighton seems to be resigned to this fact, and agrees to take out the money the following day. He is gone the entire day, which raises Silla's suspicions. Deighton comes home with an abundance of frivolous and extravagant gifts. Silla mourns the loss of the money that could have gotten them the brownstone."}
{"text":"The community attends the wedding of \u2019Gatha Steed\u2019s daughter, which turns out to be an extravagant celebration. Deighton shows up to the reception, but it is clear that everyone know what he\u2019s done, and he is essentially excommunicated. He severely injures his arm while incorrectly using machinery at a factory job, then begins to follow a cultist religion lead by a man called Father Peace. Deighton he demands to be called \"Brother Boyce\", and he renounces his family to be with other followers of Father Peace. Silla calls the authorities to have him deported back to Barbados. The family receives news that Deighton either jumped or fell off the ship that was on its way to Barbados, and he drowned."}
{"text":"Since her father's death, Selina's grief has removes her even further from the community. She attends a party hosted by her childhood friend, Beryl, where Selina learns about the Association. She realizes that her peers are all conforming to their parents\u2019 wishes rather than deciding their futures for themselves. Selina begins college. Silla owns the brownstone, and she works to get rid of Miss Mary and Suggie. Miss Mary passes away, and Silla is able to evict Suggie on the grounds that her promiscuous behavior seems suspiciously like prostitution. Selina loses two of the people she's closest to in a short span. Convinced Silla's doing it on purpose, she becomes even angrier and more reclusive."}
{"text":"Miss Thompson reveals to Selina how she got the sore on her leg. It was the result of a racist attack while she was in the South, where a man injured her with a shovel. She also encourages her to attend an Association meeting so she can re-connect with her \"people\" and her culture a bit more and stop feeling so alienated. Selina begrudgingly agrees to go, but she tells the group they are money-hungry, narrow-minded, etc. and their concerns are petty compared to what they have to face in the white world."}
{"text":"Selina meets Clive, a melancholy artist about ten years her senior. He initially seems to share a lot of Selina's personal values, and they begin a secret relationship. Selina joins her school dance team, discovering she has natural talent and enjoys it. Silla finds out about Clive, but Selina lies and says they are just friends. Silla warns Selina about him, saying that he is not the sort of person she should hang around with."}
{"text":"Selina decides to rejoin the Association under the pretense of wanting the scholarship they are offering. She plans to take the money and use it to run away with Clive. Selina dances a sola in a recital and has a racist encounter with one of the other dancer's mother afterwards. Selina goes straight to Clive's, and realizes that he never meant to go away with her. Selina leaves her copy of the key to his apartment and returns home to cry herself to sleep."}
{"text":"Selina wins the Association scholarship, but she declines the award. In private, she tells her mother she never stopped seeing Clive and what she had planned to do with the money. Selina plans to leave school and go to Barbados alone. The novel ends with Selina walking alone and tossing one of the silver bangles she has had since she was a baby towards a set of brownstones that are being torn down for a city project."}
{"text":"\"Remarkable for its colorful characters, the cadence of its dialogue and its evocation of a still-lingering past.\" \u2014 \"New York Times Book Review\"\""}
{"text":"\"Marshall brings to her characters ... an instinctive understanding, a generosity and free humor that combine to form a style remarkable for its courage, its color, and its natural control.\" \u2014 \"The New Yorker\"\""}
{"text":"\"An unforgettable novel written with pride and anger, with rebellion and tears.\" \u2014 \"New York Herald Tribune\""}
{"text":"The tension between the themes of individualism and ethnicity are explored in Martin Japtok's essay \"Paule Marshall's \"Brown Girl, Brownstones\": Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism\", which concludes: \"The simultaneous assertion of ethnicity and individualism must thus be accomplished through a constructionist conceptualization of ethnicity that allows one to see ethnic solidarity as an original response to an Old World environment that still has validity in the New World, though maybe not the same urgency. [\u2026] Selina accepts ethnic communalism while pursuing an individualist agenda, creating a new conceptualization of ethnicity in the process\"."}
{"text":"Betsey Brown is an African-American literature novel by Ntozake Shange, published in 1985."}
{"text":"\"Betsey Brown\" is the story of an adolescent African-American girl growing up in 1959 St. Louis, Missouri, who is part of the first generation of students to be integrated in the public school system. She navigates common adolescent issues such as family dynamics, first love, and identity questions."}
{"text":"Thematic concerns of the novel include African-American family life, coming of age, feminism, and racial freedom. One critic described the narrative structure of the novel as paralleling \"the personal story of Betsey\u2019s attaining self-confidence with the social achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.\" This structure allows Shange to address feminist issues in addition to racial issues."}
{"text":"In order to write the novel, Shange drew on her own experiences growing up in St. Louis, but the resulting novel is not entirely autobiographical. Nevertheless, like Betsey Brown, Shange really did know such African-American celebrities as Chuck Berry and W. E. B. Du Bois."}
{"text":"\"Betsey Brown\" was published in 1985 by St. Martin's Press."}
{"text":"Set in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Educationm \u2014the landmark case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional\u2014the novel is eponymous."}
{"text":"Though perhaps the least known of Shange's work, the novel has been called \"a little gem.\""}
{"text":"Shange adapted the novel into a musical play, which has been performed in various cities."}
{"text":"Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey."}
{"text":"Cosey was a charismatic hotel owner, and the people around him were affected by his life \u2014 even long after his death. The main characters are Christine, his granddaughter and Heed, his widow. The two are the same age and used to be friends but some forty years after Cosey's death they are sworn enemies, and yet share his mansion. Again Morrison uses split narrative and jumps back and forth throughout the story, not fully unfolding until the very end. The characters in the novel all have some relation to the infamous Bill Cosey."}
{"text":"Similar to the concept of communication between the living and the dead in her 1987 novel \"Beloved\", Morrison introduced a character named Junior; she was the medium to connect the dead Bill Cosey to the world of the living."}
{"text":"The storytelling techniques in \"Love\", namely the split narrative, suggest a recent trend in Morrison's literature that divides the plot among different time periods."}
{"text":"Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Story is a 2007 mystery novel by actor Blair Underwood and writers Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. The book was released on June 19, 2007 through Atria Books and is the first book in the \"Tennyson Hardwick\" series. \"Casanegra\" follows the adventures of Tennyson Hardwick, an actor and former gigolo. A sequel, \"In the Night of the Heat\", was released in 2009."}
{"text":"Underwood has expressed interest in filming an adaptation of \"Casanegra\" with himself potentially starring as the character of Tennyson Hardwick."}
{"text":"Tennyson \"Ten\" Hardwick is an actor trying to make it big in Hollywood, which is made difficult by his past as a gigolo that sold his body to anyone willing to pay the right price. This past has caused a distance between Tennyson and his family, especially his LAPD captain of a father. However overcoming his past proves to be harder than he imagined after Tennyson finds himself the prime suspect for the murder of Afrodite, a rapper and former client of his."}
{"text":"Underwood came up with the book's concept after working on a project with Diana Ross that would have had the two acting as a client and her gigolo. The project never came to fruition, but Underwood continued to work on the concept until he approached Due with the idea of writing a novel based upon a gigolo. The first draft of \"Casanegra\" was written by Due and subsequent drafts were co-written with Underwood and Barnes. The team drew on Walter Mosley and Zane for some of the book's influences and included several recognizable Hollywood features such as the restaurant chain Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles and the African-American owned bookstore Eso Won Books."}
{"text":"Critical reception was mostly positive. Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly both gave mostly positive reviews for \"Casanegra\", with Publishers Weekly praising the book as a \"seamlessly entertaining novel\"."}
{"text":"Legendborn is a debut young adult fantasy novel by Tracy Deonn. Called \"a modern day twist on Arthurian legend\" it follows a Black teenage girl who discovers a secret historically white magic society while attending a UNC-Chapel Hill residential pre-college program. The book is the first in the \"Legendborn\" series. It was released on September 15, 2020 and published under Simon & Schuster\/McElderry. The book was recommended by BuzzFeed, Nerdist, and io9."}
{"text":"The book centers 16-year-old Bree Matthews, who attempts to infiltrate a historically white magical society to get help hunting the demons that are terrorizing the participants at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pre-college summer program she is attending."}
{"text":"Tracy Deonn was inspired by \"The Dark is Rising\" series by Susan Cooper. She was also influenced by the death of her mother. Having worked in video games, she took that knowledge to help develop the stringent rules that guide the magical system described in the book."}
{"text":"\"Legendborn\" received positive critical reception. \"Publisher's Weekly\" stated, \"Though hazy exposition initially slows the narrative, Deonn adeptly employs the haunting history of the American South [...] to explore themes of ancestral pain, grief, and love, balancing them with stimulating worldbuilding and multiple thrilling plot twists.\" In a starred review Bookpage stated, \"Legendborn establishes Deonn as an important new voice in YA. Its gorgeous prose and heart-splitting honesty compel an eyes-wide-open reading experience.\""}
{"text":"Syfy.com called the book \"a refreshing twist on classic Arthurian legend with a lot of Southern Black girl magic to boot\". Natalie Berglind wrote in a review for the \"Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books\", \"Deonn brings Arthurian legend to life with originality, a dash of heart-pounding demon-slaying, and a deep and meaningful acknowledgement of the violent roots of slavery in U.S. history.\" \"Kirkus Reviews\" noted \"Representation of actualized, strong queer characters is organic, not forced, and so are textual conversations around emotional wellness and intergenerational trauma [...] Well-crafted allusions to established legends and other literary works are delightful easter eggs.\""}
{"text":"The Harlem Detective series of novels by Chester Himes comprises nine hardboiled novels set in the 1950s and early 1960s:"}
{"text":"Their protagonists are two black NYPD detectives (whose origins can be traced to a short story Himes published (1933) in \"Abbott's Monthly Magazine\") \u2014 Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson \u2014 whose names suggest the nature of their police methods and reputation. Jones and Johnson generally go easy with, and even tolerate, numbers operators, madames, whores, and gamblers; but they are extremely hostile to violent criminals, drug dealers, confidence tricksters and pimps. Himes says that they are tough, \"but they never came down hard on anybody that was in the right\"."}
{"text":"Himes's two Harlem detectives are mythic heroes of sorts\u2014indomitable forces of nature, their status as heavy-handed enforcers for the Man elevated to Harlem legends. So pervasive is the legend that their presence isn't needed to inspire awe or fear, mention of their name is enough. They are the law, the Man, the \"mens\", also a law onto themselves, using extralegal means to induce compliance."}
{"text":"The \"extralegal means\" frequently include physical brutality in the case of men suspected of violent crime, and psychological torture and intimidation with women who withhold information, such as when Grave Digger threatens to pistol-whip a woman \"until no man will ever look at you again\" (\"A Rage in Harlem\"), or strips another woman naked, tying her up, and making a hairline incision across her neck with a razor, then forcing her to look at the blood in a mirror."}
{"text":"Himes attempts to portray this brutality in such a way that the reader does not wholly lose sympathy with the detectives. For example, in the throat-cutting incident, the woman was a key witness in a case where a young girl was being held hostage and threatened with death by a street gang, and Himes says of Grave Digger's actions: \"He knew what he had done was unforgivable, but he couldn't stand any more lies\". Jones and Johnson get away with these methods because they manage to solve high-profile cases under great pressure and because the victims of their brutality always either get killed off by other criminals, or are found to be implicated in serious crimes themselves."}
{"text":"Notwithstanding the above, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed have deep and genuine sympathy for the innocent victims of crime. They frequently intervene to protect their black brothers and sisters from the random and truly pointless brutality of the white cops (as portrayed by Himes). Finally, the detectives seem sympathetic because they are under constant pressure to prove themselves, as the only black detectives in a precinct where the other cops are openly racist; and the flip side of their brutality is their willingness to put their own reputations and their own lives on the line whenever the interests of justice require it."}
{"text":"There is abundant, and very effective, use of \"black\" (i.e., macabre) humor to lighten the mood of the stories, and they also contain many interesting sidelights touching on subjects as diverse as political corruption, jazz, soul food, and the sexual underside of Harlem life in that era."}
{"text":"Three films have been made based on the characters of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger: \"Cotton Comes to Harlem\" (1970), \"Come Back, Charleston Blue\" (1972) and \"A Rage in Harlem\" (1991)."}
{"text":"A Small Place is a work of creative nonfiction published in 1988 by Jamaica Kincaid. A book-length essay drawing on Kincaid's experiences growing up in Antigua, it can be read as an indictment of the Antiguan government, the tourist industry and Antigua's British colonial legacy."}
{"text":"The book, written in four sections, \"combines social and cultural critique with autobiography and a history of imperialism to offer a powerful portrait of (post)colonial Antigua.\""}
{"text":"In 1493, Christopher Columbus became the first European to visit Antigua on his second voyage. He named it Antigua after the Santa Maria de la Antigua, an icon found in Seville's cathedral. Sir Thomas Warner from England was able to colonize the island in 1632 by starting plantations that included tobacco and sugarcane. Warner also introduced slavery to the island. Slaves from West Africa worked on these plantations. Antigua became known as the English Harbourtown for its great location in the Caribbean. In 1834 slavery was finally abolished, but blacks' economic conditions failed to improve due to \u201cland shortages and the universal refusal of credit\u201d."}
{"text":"In her work, Jamaica Kincaid presents an anti-imperialist dialogue which is particularly critical of tourism and government corruption, both of which became prevalent after independence. She criticizes Antigua's dependence on tourism for its economy. Kincaid also mentions the damage caused by the 1974 earthquake, which destroyed many buildings. The author also explains how many people in office were charged with all forms of corruption. This social critique led to it being described as \"an enraged essay about racism and corruption in Antigua\" by one reviewer."}
{"text":"In the first section of \"A Small Place\", Kincaid employs the perspective of the tourist in order to demonstrate the inherent escapism in creating a distance from the realities of a visited place. Nadine Dolby dissects the theme of tourism in \"A Small Place\" and places Kincaid's depiction of tourism in a globalized context that justifies Kincaid's strong feelings toward it. Dolby corroborates Kincaid's depiction of the tourist creating separation by \"othering\" the locale and the individuals that inhabit it. Furthermore, the tourist industry is linked to a global economic system that ultimately does not translate into benefits for the very Antiguans who enable it."}
{"text":"The tourist may experience the beauty on the surface of Antigua while being wholly ignorant of the actual political and social conditions that the Antiguan tourism industry epitomizes and reinforces. Corinna Mcleod points out the disenfranchising nature of the tourism industry in its reinforcement of an exploitative power structure. In effect, the industry recolonizes Antigua by placing locals at a disenfranchised and subservient position in a global economic system that ultimately does not serve them."}
{"text":"While Kincaid expresses anger towards slavery, colonialism and the broken Antiguan identity that it has left in its wake, she avoids retreating to simple racialization in order to explain the past and present, for doing so would further \"other\" an already marginalized group of people. Kincaid sheds light on the oppressive hierarchical structures of colonialism, which is still evident in the learned power structures of present-day, post-colonial Antigua."}
{"text":"While she indeed acknowledges the justifications of oppression based on race in England's colonization of Antigua, she also attempts to transcend the notions of an inescapable racialized past. In doing so she attempts to shape readers\u2019 view of Antigua by creating a sense of agency."}
{"text":"In 1988, \"A Small Place\" was criticized as a vitriolic attack on the government and people of Antigua. \"New Yorker\" editor Robert Gottlieb refused to publish it. According to \"Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother\" she was not only banned unofficially for five years from her home country but she voiced concerns that had she gone back in that time, she worried she would be killed."}
{"text":"Jane King, in \"A Small Place Writes Back\", declared that \"Kincaid does not like the Caribbean very much, finds it dull and boring and would rather live in Vermont. There can really be no difficulty with that, but I do not see why Caribbean people should admire her for denigrating our small place in this destructively angry fashion.\" Moira Ferguson, a feminist academic, argued that as \"an African-Caribbean writer Kincaid speaks to and from the position of the other. Her characters are often maligned by history and subjected to a foreign culture, while Kincaid herself has become an increasingly mainstream American writer\u201d"}
{"text":"Parable of the Sower is a 1993 science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, the first in a two-book series. It is an apocalypse science fiction novel that provides commentary on climate change and social inequality. It is the first of a series of two books. The novel follows Lauren Olamina in her quest for freedom. Several characters from various walks of life join her on her journey north and learn of a religion she has crafted titled Earthseed. In this religion, the destiny for believers is to inhabit other planets. \"Parable of the Sower\" was the winner of two awards and adapted into a concert and a graphic novel. \"Parable of the Sower\" has influenced music and essays on social justice."}
{"text":"Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, \"Parable of the Sower\" takes the form of a journal kept by Lauren Oya Olamina, an African American teenager. Her mother abused drugs during her pregnancy and left Lauren with \"hyper-empathy\" or \"sharing\" \u2013 the uncontrollable ability to feel the sensations she witnesses in others, particularly pain."}
{"text":"Lauren's youngest brother, Keith, rebelliously runs away to live outside the walls of the community. For a time, he survives by joining a group of ruthless thieves who value him for his rare literacy, but he is eventually found dead after torture. Later, Lauren's father disappears while leaving the community for work, and is accepted as dead."}
{"text":"When Lauren is eighteen in 2027, the community's security is breached in an organized attack by outsiders: most of the community is destroyed, looted, and murdered, including Lauren's family. She travels north, disguised as a man, with Henry and Zahra, two survivors from her community. Society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty. U.S. states have become akin to city-states, with strict borders. Money still has value, but travellers constantly fear attacks for resources or by pyromaniac drug-users, cannibals, and wild dogs. Mixed-race relationships are stigmatized and women constantly fear sexual assault. Slavery has returned in the form of indebted servitude."}
{"text":"Lauren gathers people to protect along her journey and begins to share the Earthseed religion, which is developing into a collection of texts titled \"Earthseed: The Books of the Living\". She believes that humankind's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets, forcing humankind into its adulthood, and that Earthseed is preparation for this destiny. Lauren begins a relationship with Bankole, an older doctor who joins the group, and agrees to marry him. Bankole leads the group to the land he owns in Northern California, where the group settles and Lauren founds the first Earthseed community, Acorn."}
{"text":"Published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1993, by Women's Press Ltd. in 1995, by Warner in 1995 and 2000, and by Seven Stories Press in 2017."}
{"text":"\"Parable of the Sower\" was adapted as \"Parable of the Sower: The Concert Version\", a work-in-progress opera written by American folk\/blues musician Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, singer and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon. The adaptation's libretto and musical score combine African-American spirituals, soul, rock and roll, and folk music into rounds to be performed by singers sitting in a circle. It was performed as part of The Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival in New York City in 2015 and in 2018."}
{"text":"In 2020 it was adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, the team which had previously adapted Butler's novel \"Kindred\", and published by Abrams ComicArts. The graphic novel was named to the Black Lives Matter Reading Lists compiled by the Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association."}
{"text":"The work of hip hop\/R&B duo THEESatisfaction was influenced by Octavia Butler. The third track from their 2012 album \"awE NaturalE\", \"Earthseed\", contains themes from the \"Parable\" series: \"Change there are few words \/ That you can say \/ We all watch things morphing everyday.\""}
{"text":"In 2015, Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha co-edited \"Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements\", a collection of 20 short stories and essays about social justice inspired by Butler. In 2020, adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon began collaborating on a podcast called Octavia's Parables."}
{"text":"The Good House is a horror novel by American writer Tananarive Due, first published in 2003 by Atria Books. The story follows Angela Toussaint as she returns to her late grandmother's home in Sacajawea, Washington."}
{"text":"Possessing the Secret of Joy is a 1992 novel by Alice Walker."}
{"text":"The novel explores what it means to have one's gender culturally defined and emphasizes that, according to Walker, \"Torture is not culture.\""}
{"text":"Tashi \"Evelyn\" Johnson- The main protagonist of the novel. She is haunted by her experiences as a child and on the run from her memories, especially the act of female circumcision that she underwent as a young adult rather than a young child like other children following the tradition of her village. The novel delves into her struggles recuperating emotionally and physically from the circumcision as she is enveloped in revelations about the underlying meaning of her culture. Once she has the procedure done things go downhill pretty quickly and Tashi goes mad."}
{"text":"Adam Johnson- The son of Celie from The Color Purple, he is Tashi's lovingly supportive husband. Adam watches Tashi's downward spiral into darkness with the miserable frustration of being incapable of helping her. His intensely powerful insecurity and fear causes him to indulge in a merely comforting affair with his longtime friend, the French feminist, Lissete. As a result of their extramarital union, their son, Pierre is born. Adam is heartbroken as his affair pushes Tashi further away, and must face the consequences of his actions."}
{"text":"Benny Johnson- Tashi and Adam's adult son; Benny has an intellectual disability as a result of his brain being damaged during his birth, which was complicated because of Tashi's infibulation. Benny's limited abilities make Tashi increasingly depressed because she blames her circumcised vulva for Benny's agonizing journey from her womb. Benny is very curious about the world and is willing to study about it in order to keep up conversations with his parents."}
{"text":"Lisette- Adam's lover and mother of Pierre, Adam's second son."}
{"text":"Dura- Tashi's older sister that bled to death in childhood due to the ritual circumcision. Tashi comes to view Dura's death as a murder, and repeatedly emphasizes that Dura has been \"screaming in her ears\" since her death."}
{"text":"M'Lissa- \"Tsunga\" of the tribe into which M'Lissa was born. The \"tsunga\" performs circumcisions (e.g. excision and infibulation) on the girls of the tribe. M'Lissa performed the circumcision on Dura that caused her to bleed to death."}
{"text":"Carl Gustav Jung- Jung appears as the therapist of Tashi, the novel's protagonist. He is usually called \"Mzee\" but is identified by Alice Walker in the afterword."}
{"text":"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912\/1927) by James Weldon Johnson is the fictional account of a young biracial man, referred to only as the \"Ex-Colored Man,\" living in post-Reconstruction era America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He lives through a variety of experiences, including witnessing a lynching, that convince him to \"pass\" as white to secure his safety and advancement, but he feels as if he has given up his dream of \"glorifying\" the black race by composing ragtime music."}
{"text":"Johnson originally published \"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man\" anonymously in 1912, via the small Boston publisher Sherman, French, & Company. He decided to publish it anonymously because he was uncertain how the potentially controversial book would affect his diplomatic career. He wrote openly about issues of race and discrimination that were not common then in literature. The book's initial public reception was poor. It was republished in 1927, with some minor changes of phraseology, by Alfred A. Knopf, an influential firm that published many Harlem Renaissance writers, and Johnson was credited as the author."}
{"text":"Despite the title, the book is a novel. It is drawn from the lives of people Johnson knew and from events in his life. Johnson's text is an example of a roman \u00e0 clef."}
{"text":"The novel begins with a frame tale in which the unnamed narrator describes the narrative that follows as \"the great secret of my life.\" The narrator notes that he is taking a substantial risk by composing the narrative, but that it is one he feels compelled to record, regardless. The narrator also chooses to withhold the name of the small Georgia town where his narrative begins, as there are still living residents of the town who might be able to connect him to the narrative."}
{"text":"Throughout the novel, the adult narrator from the frame interjects into the text to offer reflective commentary into the events of the narrative."}
{"text":"Born shortly after the Civil War in a small Georgia town, the narrator's African-American mother protected him as a child and teenager. The narrator's father, a wealthy white member of the Southern aristocracy, is absent throughout the narrator's childhood but, nevertheless, continues to provide financial support for the narrator and his mother. Because of that financial support, she had the means to raise her son in an environment more middle-class than many black people could enjoy at the time."}
{"text":"While in school, the narrator also grows to admire and befriends \"Shiny,\" an unmistakably African-American boy, who is described as one of the brightest and best-spoken children in the class."}
{"text":"After the narrator's mother dies, he becomes a poor orphan and subject to harsh conditions."}
{"text":"He adapted very well to life with lower-class black people and was able to move easily among the classes of black society. During this carefree period, he taught music and attended church, where he came in contact with upper-class black people. Living in an all black community, he discovers and describes three classes of black people: the desperate, the domestics, and the independent workmen or professionals."}
{"text":"The Ex-Colored Man believed the desperate class consists of lower-class black people who loathe the whites. The domestic worker class comprises black people who work as servants to whites. And the artisans, skilled workers, and black professionals class included black people who had little interaction with the whites. Many white readers, who viewed all black people as a stereotype of a single class, were unfamiliar with class distinctions described among black people."}
{"text":"While playing ragtime at a late night hot spot in New York, the Ex-Colored Man caught the attention of a wealthy white gentleman. The gentleman's liking for ragtime develops as liking for the Ex-Colored Man himself. The white gentleman hired him to play ragtime piano for guests at parties. Soon the Ex-Colored Man spent most of his time working for the white gentleman, who paid him to play ragtime music for hours at a time. He would play until the white gentleman would say \"that will do.\" The Ex-Colored man would tire after the long hours but would continue playing as he saw the joy and serenity he brought the white gentleman."}
{"text":"The Ex-Colored Man's devotion to the white gentleman expresses the relationship that some slaves had with their masters (slaves who showed devotion to the slave-owner). Johnson suggests that, although the Ex-Colored Man had \"freedom,\" he was still suffering from the effects of slavery. After playing for the white gentleman while touring Europe, the Ex-Colored Man decided to leave him and return to the South to study Negro spirituals. He planned to use his knowledge of classical and ragtime music to create a new Black American musical genre. He wanted to \"bring glory and honor to the Negro race,\" to return to his heritage, and proud and self-righteous race."}
{"text":"Many critics have suspected that the Rich White Gentleman may not be white but is passing, as well. His love for ragtime music and his conviction that the Ex-Colored Man not embrace his blackness to pursue a career as a definitively black composer could be used to argue that he experienced inner turmoil with his racial identity similar to that experienced by the Ex-Colored Man."}
{"text":"Many critics believe that Johnson wrote this scene to heighten awareness of and opposition to lynchings. The turn of the century was the peak of lynchings conducted against blacks, mostly in the South, in the period when southern states disfranchised blacks through new constitutions and practices such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and white primaries. Michael Berube writes, \"there is no question that Johnson wrote the book, in large part, to try to stem the tide of lynchings sweeping the nation.\""}
{"text":"After the lynching, the Ex-Colored Man decides to \"pass\" as white. He gives up his dream of making music to glorify his race and thinks he does not want to be \"identified with people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals,\" or with people who could treat other humans that way. He simply wishes to remain neutral. The Ex-Colored Man declares that he \"would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race.\""}
{"text":"The world accepted the Ex-Colored Man as white. Our narrator has been \"passing\" as a white man for the remainder of his life, and titles his autobiographical narrative \"Ex-Colored Man.\" At the same time, the narrator learns that his childhood friend, \"Shiny,\" is now teaching as a professor at a Negro college, suggesting a contrast between himself, who has chosen to pass, and Shiny, who has embraced his African-American heritage."}
{"text":"The narrator eventually begins a courtship with a white woman, causing an internal dilemma as to whether or not to reveal his African-American heritage, and he asks her to marry him. After the two have a chance meeting with Shiny, in which the narrator is \"surprised at the amount of interest a refined black man could arouse,\" the narrator decides to reveal his secret to her. At first shocked, she flees, and the narrator resolves to give her sufficient space to let her make up her mind. Eventually, she returns to him, having absorbed his revelation and chosen to accept him. They are eventually married and have two children, and the narrator lives out his life as a successful yet mediocre businessman."}
{"text":"His wife dies during the birth of their second child, leaving the narrator alone to raise their two children. At the end of the book, the Ex-colored Man says:"}
{"text":"My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage."}
{"text":"\"Passing\" could be interpreted as a decision to avoid the black race. He states that he \"regrets holding himself back.\" He may have been implying that if he had, he embraced the Negro community and let the community embrace him, that he could have made a difference."}
{"text":"A major shift in the plot occurs during a performance of \"Faust\" in Paris, when the narrator sees his wealthy white father and his legitimate family, including his biological half-sister. Throughout the novel, the narrator is locked in a continual cycle of bargaining. The final bargain is trading his aspirations and talents for mediocrity to \"pass\" and allow his children to pass, raising the question as to whether this is damnation or continual striving."}
{"text":"A Mercy is Toni Morrison's ninth novel. It was published in 2008. \"A Mercy\" reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery in early America. It is both the story of mothers and daughters and the story of a primitive America. It made the \"New York Times Book Review\" list of \"10 Best Books of 2008\" as chosen by the paper's editors. In Fall 2010 it was chosen for the One Book, One Chicago program."}
{"text":"All these characters are bereft of their roots, struggling to survive in a new and alien environment filled with danger and disease. When smallpox threatens Rebekka's life, Florens, now 16, is sent to find a black freedman who has some knowledge of herbal medicines. Her journey is dangerous, ultimately proving to be the turning point in her life."}
{"text":"Morrison examines the roots of racism going back to slavery's earliest days, providing glimpses of the various religious practices of the time, and showing the relationship between men and women in early America that often ended in female victimization. They are \"of and for men\", people who \"never shape the world, The world shapes us\". As the women journey toward self-enlightenment, Morrison often describes their progress in Biblical cadences, and by the end of this novel, the reader understands the significance of the title, \"a mercy\"."}
{"text":"Silver Sparrow is the third novel by the American author Tayari Jones, which was first published in 2011. The novel follows the complicated relationship between two families, joined together by a bigamist father. Jones was inspired to write the book by her own relationship with her sisters who were over a decade older than her and who she felt lived very different lives than her own. In 2019, the writer and actress Issa Rae announced plans to adapt the novel into a film."}
{"text":"Dana Lynn Yarboro's parents meet in Atlanta, Georgia when her father is buying an anniversary present for his wife. Her mother, a young divorc\u00e9e named Gwen Yarboro, becomes James Witherspoon's mistress. Dana is born shortly before the birth of James's daughter Chaurisse, from his marriage to his wife Laverne. After Chaurisse's birth, Gwen pressures James to illegally marry her which he consents to though he does not leave Laverne."}
{"text":"Dana grows up with the knowledge that her father is married to another woman and has another daughter. Dana and her mother are kept secret, however the only individual from James's other life that is aware of the situation is his childhood friend and adopted brother, Raleigh. Dana is prevented from participating in certain jobs and going to certain schools in order to protect Chaurisse, however while attending a high school science competition she runs into Chaurisse who she notices is wearing the exact same fur jacket as her, both presents given to them by their father, James."}
{"text":"While still a teenager, Dana becomes involved with a young adult man, Marcus McCready, and while her father is displeased he does nothing to stop her as he knows McCready from his married life."}
{"text":"In her final year of high school Dana is introduced to her paternal grandmother, Bunny Witherspoon, as she is dying. Her grandmother bequeaths her her favourite brooch as a parting gift."}
{"text":"Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon grows up the protected and beloved daughter of James Witherspoon and Laverne Witherspoon. Her parents met at the age of 14 when her mother lost her virginity to her father and subsequently became pregnant and was forced to marry James and leave school. Their son was a stillborn but Laverne remained with the Witherspoons. They managed to claw their way to being middle-class business owners with James and his brother Raleigh running a chauffeur business and Laverne running a beauty salon out of their garage."}
{"text":"While out shopping Chaurisse meets a young girl and saves both of them from being caught shoplifting. The girl is named Dana, and Chaurisse grows infatuated with her believing she is a \"silver\" girl who is beautiful and leads a charmed life. The two become friends with the shy Dana eventually meeting and befriending Laverne as well."}
{"text":"Some fifteen years later Dana has a daughter. Though, she does not marry her daughter's father he publicly claims his daughter as his own which Dana considers progress. She is visited by Chaurisse who asks Dana if James continued to see her and her mother after reconciling with Laverne. Dana reveals that after reuniting with Laverne she only saw James briefly at his vow renewal to Laverne. At this point, James told her she had finally achieved what she wanted: recognition of her paternity at the cost of her private relationship with him. She understands that nevertheless Laverne and Chaurisse have never been able to believe that they have won."}
{"text":"\"The Washington Post\" described Jones's writing as \"realistic and sparkling\". \"The Chicago Tribune\" praised the novel as \"an exciting read all the way through.\" However, \"Publishers Weekly\" criticized the novel as \"growing increasingly histrionic and less believable\" as it went on."}
{"text":"\"A Funeral at New African\" details the death and the aftermath of Sarah's father, Reverend Phillips. Sarah's major reflection around this time in her and her family's life is how her father, and his death, started to belong to everyone else but the immediate family."}
{"text":"Education\u2014Sarah's education primes her to attend Harvard, live in Paris, meet European lovers, and escape the confines of her religious middle-class home life. She simultaneously seeks her parents' utter disapproval, and their unconditional worship. Boarding school, then the elite university provide her with the opportunity to escape their grasp and explore the world. This opportunity exposes the often condescending or ignorant attitudes of Sarah's peers. It gives a window into a world in which people who looked like Sarah did not, historically, have a place. This opportunity also exposes some of Sarah's privilege, and naivety."}
{"text":"Privilege\u2014Sarah is a black student at an all-white boarding school. In one scene, after an audition she feels is strong, Sarah is cast as the black housemaid in the school play. It is clear to her, in that moment, how her appearance shapes some outcomes more than her talent, determination, or character. Still, Sarah has privileges many black Americans do not have at the time Lee wrote the novel. She belongs to a stable, prosperous family that educates and loves her. She receives the opportunity to improve her own future when she is invited to boarding school. Navigating the intersections of these identities thus becomes part of Sarah's coming-of-age process."}
{"text":"Coming of age\u2014Although she deals with the added complications of being black in a predominantly white space, and being minimally religious in a devout household, Sarah struggles to find her identity throughout her adolescence and young adulthood like any other character. She navigates these by developing a heightened self-awareness\u2014of her positionality in different spaces, as well as of her own strengths, weaknesses, feelings, and tendencies."}
{"text":"Intersections of race and class: Sarah sometimes struggles to be seen as an equal among her white peers. At the same time, she sometimes exhibits similarly exclusive tendencies. For example, she initially ignores the black cook at school, thinking she is too good for him. Her church communities demonstrates some of the same class tensions. Many well-off black families drive into South Philly to go to Sunday morning services. But then they drive expensive cars back out to the suburbs, while poorer black families are left to live in the \"inner-city\". She lives in an \"earnest, prosperous black family in which Civil Rights and concern for the underprivileged are served up\"."}
{"text":"Family approval\u2014Sarah reminisces on her friendship with Curry, the son, also studying at Harvard, of her mom's distant cousin and childhood best friend. She says they \"both harbored ill-conceived ideals of leading lives that would almost geometrically contravene anything of which our parents would approve\"."}
{"text":"Intimacy\u2014Sarah finds intimacy challenging in a number of the stories contained in \"Sarah Phillips\". She sometimes struggles to identify the lines between friendship and romance (with Curry Daniels), or the difference between passionate romance and abusive relationship behavior."}
{"text":"While Andrea Lee's first novel, \"Russian Journal\", was nominated for a National Book Award for Nonfiction, \"Sarah Phillips\" received no awards. It has, however, become the topic of academic literature, journal articles, and much classroom conversation. Both the popular reception to the novel and academic opinions vary widely. Some examples are included below:"}
{"text":"In a November 1984 review in \"The New York Times\", novelist Susan Richards Shreve described \"Sarah Phillips\" as an \"unsentimental autobiography\". She continued, it \"is clear that Miss Lee intended her to be a child of the civil rights movement, representative of a new black woman, educated, sassy, worldly, harshly critical, somewhat self- deprecating and bound for a kind of glory\"."}
{"text":"Invoking the philosophies of W.E.B. DuBois and William Faulkner, Don N. Enomoto argued, in a 1999 Journal article published by MELUS, \"Sarah Phillips\" is ideal material for exploring the tensions between \"theory and tradition\". He wrote that Sarah Phillips, the character, fights \"to liberate herself from restrictive conditions while constructing a new identity that better reflects her own subjective experience of reality\"."}
{"text":"In March, 1985, a student writer for \"The Harvard Crimson\" said \"Sarah Phillips\" is \"really a collection of finely shaped autobiographical short stories\"."}
{"text":"Adrienne McCormick, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Winthrop University, said in a 2004 essay published by the Johns Hopkins University Press that \"Sarah Phillips\" \"raises questions about the middle class black woman's ability to recognize, let alone resist, racism and sexism as they intersect with class privilege\"."}
{"text":"In a January 1985 \"Los Angeles Times\" review, Lola D. Gillebaard said \"Sarah is not consciously clashing with issues of history in these chapters, but author Lee has clearly made her a child of the educated, cheeky, cosmopolitan, critical and bound for achievement\"."}
{"text":"This variety in response to, and interpretation of, \"Sarah Phillips\", is part of what Valerie Smith discusses in her introduction to the novel, as mentioned earlier."}
{"text":"Devil in a Blue Dress is a 1990 hardboiled mystery novel by Walter Mosley, his first published book."}
{"text":"The text centers on the main character, Ezekiel \"Easy\" Rawlins, and his transformation from a day laborer into a detective."}
{"text":"Set in 1948, the story begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, with Ezekiel \"Easy\" Rawlins, a Houstonian \u2014 from that city's Fifth Ward \u2014 who lost his job at an aviation defense plant in Los Angeles and is unable to pay the mortgage on his LA home. Easy is sitting in a bar run by Joppy, a friend who is also from Houston, when a man named DeWitt Albright walks into the bar and offers him a job finding a young white woman named Daphne Monet, who is rumored to be hanging out in bars frequented mostly by African Americans, although white women are allowed inside."}
{"text":"At the bar, Easy meets two old friends, Coretta and Dupree, among many other people that he knew from his former life in Houston. Coretta says that she knows Daphne, but gives an incorrect address to Easy. He goes home with them and has sex with Coretta, while Dupree is asleep in the next room. Easy then leaves her early the next morning, only to be arrested by the LAPD. Shortly thereafter, following police interrogation, Easy is told that Coretta is dead, and that he is a suspect in her murder."}
{"text":"When Easy finally does find Monet, he figures out that she has stolen a large amount of money from a man named Todd Carter, who is a local wealthy businessman. Albright wanted this money for himself. Eventually, Albright finds Monet through Easy, who is trying to shield the thieving woman."}
{"text":"Easy enlists the help of a friend and fellow Houstonian, Mouse, who shows up due to a half-hearted invitation from Easy, and domestic strife back home. Easy and Mouse find Monet with Albright and Joppy. They rescue her, and kill Joppy and Albright. Then Mouse reveals that Monet is actually Ruby, an African-American woman passing as white, and the sister of a local gangster named Green. Mouse and Easy blackmail Ruby, taking her money and dividing it into thirds for each of them. Daphne\/Ruby leaves shortly thereafter, and Easy has to clean up the mess with the police, as well as Carter, who had initially hired Albright to find her, since he really did love her and not his money."}
{"text":"Easy approaches Carter and requests his help with the police. He blackmails him by saying that he will leak the information about his love for a black woman unless he is protected from the law. Carter helps him. At the conclusion, Mouse returns to Houston, Easy takes up detective work, and Ruby disappears."}
{"text":"The novel is an important contribution to African-American and ethnic detective fiction in that it focuses on a black protagonist who falls into the role of detective, but by the series' end, has made his own both the profession and the identity that often comes along with it. Particularly noteworthy are Easy's use of African-American English and the emergence of \"the Voice\" (an inner voice that advises Easy during particularly stressful or dangerous situations). Literary scholars of ethnic detective fiction have explored the qualities in conjunction with approaches in genre study and gender identity approaches."}
{"text":"First published by W.W. Norton in 1990, \"Devil In a Blue Dress\" won the 1991 Shamus Award in the category of \"Best First P. I. Novel\"."}
{"text":"\"Devil In a Blue Dress\" was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name, which starred Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins, and also featured Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizemore, Maury Chaykin, as well as Don Cheadle as the unhinged 'Mouse'."}
{"text":"In 1996, a 10-part abridgement by Margaret Busby, read by Paul Winfield, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, starting on April 1."}
{"text":"Push is the debut novel of American author Sapphire. Thirteen years after its release in 1996, the novel was made into the 2009 film \"Precious\", which won numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards."}
{"text":"Critics have gone in both directions as far as their opinions of the style in which \"Push\" is written. Some consider \"the harrowing story line [to be] exaggerated,\" saying that it doesn't seem realistic to \"saddle one fictional character with so many problems straight from today's headlines\" (Glenn). Others have stated that while the dialect is problematic, Precious herself is believable because she \"speaks in a darting stream of consciousness of her days in an unexpectedly evocative fashion\" (Mahoney)."}
{"text":"Precious begins the novel functionally illiterate. She spells words phonetically. She uses a \"minimal English that defies the conventions of spelling and usage and dispenses all verbal decorum\" (Mahoney). She employs variations such as \"nuffin'\" for \"nothing\", \"git\" for \"get\", \"borned\" for \"born\", \"wif\" for \"with\", and \"chile\" for \"child\". She also uses an array of profanity and harsh details that reflect the life she has experienced. Michiko Kakutani, a book reviewer for \"The New York Times\", states that Precious' \"voice conjures up [her] gritty unforgiving world.\""}
{"text":"As the book progresses and Precious learns to read and write, there is a stark change in her voice, though the dialect remains the same."}
{"text":"In 2011, Sapphire published a semi-sequel, \"The Kid\". It follows the life of Precious' son Abdul from the age of nine to 19. Precious herself has died following complications from HIV, but was accepted to college before her death."}
{"text":"All American Boys, published in 2015 by Atheneum, is a young adult novel written by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. The book tells the story of two teenage boys, Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins, as they handle racism and police brutality in their communityThe novel has gained attention in recent years due, becoming the third most banned book of 2020, due to its inclusion of anti-police messages, alcohol, drug usage and profanity."}
{"text":"Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely met on a Simon & Schuster book tour in 2013. While sharing a room on the book tour, they heard the news that George Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Reynolds and Kiely began to share their feelings and frustrations, developing a friendship. After Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, Reynolds and Kiely began writing All American Boys as a way to address police brutality and racial profiling. The book was published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster."}
{"text":"The book follows two characters, Rashad Butler and Quinn, as they navigate racism. The novel switches between the perspective of a black boy, Rashad, written by Jason Reynolds, and a white boy, Quinn, written by Brendan Kiely.Rashad is a 16-year-old who is assaulted by a white police officer in a convenience store. Quinn is a witness to the incident."}
{"text":"\"All American Boys\" won the inaugural Walter Dean Myers Award from the We Need Diverse Books organization inn 2016 and the Coretta Scott King Award. In 2016, the novel won the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for Young Adult Fiction."}
{"text":"In 2020, \"All American Boys\" landed the third position on the American Library Association's list of the most commonly banned and challenged books in the United States. The book was banned, challenged, and\/or restricted \"for profanity, drug use, and alcoholism, and because it was thought to promote anti-police views, contain divisive topics, and be 'too much of a sensitive matter right now.'\""}
{"text":"Two parents, one of whom a police officer with children at Bailey Middle School in Cornelius, North Carolina, challenged All American Boys. Police officers, faculty members and community members were all involved in the review process, with the school inviting officers to attend classes in which the novel was taught. After the review process, Board members decided in September 2019 to keep the book as a part of the eighth-grade curriculum. Board members and leaders stated that the novel has the ability to open student\u2019s\u2019 minds to social justice issues and contemporary issues they face."}
{"text":"A Business Career is a novel by African-American author Charles Chesnutt that features the life of a \"new woman\" of the late 19th century; she enters the world of business instead of embracing the traditional roles of women. It explores a failed romance between two successful upper-class members. A family\u2019s vendetta against the man who allegedly destroyed the family's fortune is revealed to be mistaken. The novel was unusual for its time as Chesnutt wrote only about white society."}
{"text":"The book was completed in 1890 but Chesnutt, who had published only a few short stories by then, was unable to interest a publisher in it. The book's depiction of white society may have contributed to that failure. Editor Walter Hines Page, who declined the book, nevertheless encouraged Chesnutt in his writing and later published other works by him."}
{"text":"Since the late 20th century, there has been a revival of interest in Chesnutt. This novel was published posthumously in 2005 with an introduction and editing by Matthew Wilson."}
{"text":"The story takes place in 1890s in the Midwest city of Groveland (critics consider this a fictional stand-in for Cleveland, where Chesnutt lived). At the Truscott Refining Company, the male stenographer has just been fired. Stella Merwin fills in temporarily; she has already learned shorthand. When an opportunity opens up, she stays in the job longer than intended. The company is owned by the man whom her family believes has destroyed its reputation and honor."}
{"text":"The Truscott Refining Company is at the brink of collapse because the company needs $200,000 that it owes to its creditors. Luckily Matilda Wedderburn comes to Truscott\u2019s rescue, even though he put their romance to an end, by offering her good friend the money that he desperately needs therefore saving the company."}
{"text":"Stella moves back to Cloverdale leaving Groveland in her rear-view mirror because she wants to forget about her experience working for Wendell Truscott as much as possible. She soon receives a letter from Truscott asking her to come back to work because he cannot find anyone who did as good a job as she did, but more importantly he wants her to come back because she loves him. In the letter Truscott says, \"Come back to me, dear child, or let me come to you, and we will part no more forever, as long as we both shall live.\""}
{"text":"Stella Merwin (Miss Smith): The protagonist of the novel is a \"new woman\" of the late 19th century who pursues a life outside the traditional roles of wife and mother. As a junior in college, she learns shorthand, which enables her to secure a job as a stenographer. She works for The Truscott Refining Company with the objective of trying to find documents to restore her family\u2019s wealth."}
{"text":"Wendell Truscott: The wealthy proprietor of the Truscott Refining Company whom the Merwin family blames for their financial ruin. He is a crafty businessman. It is revealed that he never betrayed his mentor Henry Merwin, but provided for his family."}
{"text":"Mrs. Paxton: Stella\u2019s mentor who gets her the job at Truscott Refining. She guides Stella in the business world and becomes a friend."}
{"text":"Mr. Peters: The former stenographer, fired for tardiness due to excessive drinking."}
{"text":"Mr. Ross: The bookkeeper of Truscott Refining, who steals $20,000 from the company, but escapes to South America. Stella Merwin's judgment of him is proved true by events."}
{"text":"Matilda Wedderburn: A beautiful, wealthy woman being courted by Wendell Truscott. Her hopes of marrying him end when he \"falls for\" Stella Merwin. As a friend, she loans Truscott money to save the company."}
{"text":"Mrs. Merwin: The mother of Stella and George, and wife of Henry Merwin. The widow has trouble dealing with her decline in status and yearns to return to her high place in society"}
{"text":"George Merwin: Stella\u2019s brother, who also lives and works in Groveland. George has a gambling problem and falls into debt, leading to his arrest. He is saved by a stranger, revealed to be Wendell Truscott, whom the Merwin family considers an enemy. He is sent to a ranch in the West for rehabilitation."}
{"text":"The major theme of this novel is the emergence of the new woman in American society at the turn of the century. Mrs. Merwin exemplifies the traditional female role as a mother and wife, but Stella Merwin pursues higher education. Her schooling allows her to get a job in the business world that pays a substantial salary. Stella has the financial independence to thrive without relying on a husband. During this period, the number of women working in offices, previously limited to men, was on the rise. Gradually women replaced men as clerks and stenographers."}
{"text":"Chesnutt explores the financial inequality in the structure of society. This era was known for the vast disparity in wealth between the classes, as the upper class lived in luxurious mansions with many servants and enjoyed the theatre, but the lower class struggled through life by working long hours in a factory or office. The Merwins family's drastic decline in financial standing is similar to that of the title character in William Dean Howells' novel \"The Rise of Silas Lapham\", now considered a literary classic. Chesnutt explores Mrs. Merwin's difficulty as a beleaguered widow, no longer in the upper class."}
{"text":"Chesnutt wrote a novel of Realism, portraying society, as was the major form of his time. He did not use a high style of elaborate language or refer to the mythical characters popular in an earlier generation. The novel effectively captures the business world by describing The Truscott Refining Company\u2019s inner workings."}
{"text":"The novel follows the form of a romance, as Matilda Wedderburn and Wendell Truscott engage in a courtship. This fails after he falls for his young stenographer. The courtship is highlighted by nights out at the theatre and dinner parties with the family. It omits the sexual component prevalent in modern courtship and portrayed in current literature. The romantic plot was also featured in Howells' novel, \"The Rise of Silas Lapham.\""}
{"text":"When Chesnutt completed his novel in 1890, he was unable to find a publisher for it. At the time he had published only a few short stories set in the South, recounting the culture of slave life on plantations. Although Houghton Mifflin chose not to publish the novel, editor Walter Hines Page advised Chesnutt, \"You will doubtless be able to find a publisher, and my advice to you is decidedly to keep trying till you do find one.\" Page encouraged Chesnutt in his career, and later Houghton Mifflin published other works by him."}
{"text":"Twenty-first century scholar Matthew Wilson believes Chesnutt may have been trying to appeal in this work to white readers, who made up most of the market for literature. Chesnutt, along with Paul Laurence Dunbar, was one of the first African-American writers to write in the \"white life\" genre, to portray only white characters and white society. Dunbar\u2019s novel, \"The Uncalled\", was published in 1901, but failed to sell successfully."}
{"text":"Matthew Wilson says about African-American authors at the turn of the 20th century:"}
{"text":"\"Very little expressed interest in representations of whiteness in the black imagination. Black cultural and social critics allude to such representations in their writing, yet only a few have dared to make explicit those perceptions of whiteness that they think will discomfort or antagonize readers.\"He describes Chesnutt and Dunbar as pushing the prescribed limits of race in their writings."}
{"text":"Charles Chesnutt viewed his work differently than most in terms of its racial implications. After receiving an award from the NAACP in the early 1900s, Chesnutt said he was \"Not a Negro writing about Negroes, but a human being writing about other human beings.\" He did not see color in his writing. But, many critics considered African Americans to be inferior writers who had to stay in their own \"league\". At the time, books about the antebellum South were popular. It was a time of reconciliation between the North and South, and members of the Northern literary establishment were interested in black writers who portrayed the slavery years."}
{"text":"It is not known whether Chesnutt tried to find another publisher for \"A Business Career,\" but it was among his six unpublished manuscripts found at the time of his death. In his introduction to this novel, editor Mathew Wilson says, \"African American writers have had no right to represent white-life exclusively because to grant that right would be to acknowledge the permeability of the color line\". Wilson believes that Chesnutt has still not received the recognition he deserves for this pioneering effort in crossing the color line to write about white society."}
{"text":"When it was published in 2005 over a century after it was written, \"A Business Career\" received little attention from critics or readers. One of the first of its kind, the novel has faded to the edge of American Literature."}
{"text":"Where the Line Bleeds is the debut novel by American writer Jesmyn Ward. It was published in 2008 by Scribner."}
{"text":"Ward had difficulty finding a publisher for the novel. Between this and the low pay she received from her job as a composition instructor, Ward considered abandoning writing to pursue a career in nursing. But before she went gave up entirely, Doug Siebold of Agate Publishing accepted the novel, and the company published it in 2008. Shortly after, Ward was awarded a Stegner Fellowship which allowed her to continue writing. The book was reissued by Scribner in 2018."}
{"text":"Characters from the novel have later appeared in other books by Ward."}
{"text":"\"Where the Line Bleeds\" follows twin brothers who have just graduated from high school on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Poor and Black, they find few economic opportunities as they struggle to undertake their adult lives."}
{"text":"The novel received positive reviews. Reviews from \"Kirkus\" and \"Publishers Weekly\" praised the novel as a strong debut. In the \"Austin Chronicle,\" Elizabeth Jackson compared Ward\u2019s style to William Faulkner and noted the potential in \u201ca female, black author invoking the (white) father of Southern letters to explore the world of a poor, rural, black family\u201d, calling it \u201can exciting proposition, with original and subversive implications\u201d. Jackson expresses some reservation, saying Ward\u2019s potential remains just that\u2014potential, with some overwritten scenes that Jackson anticipates will improve in future work\u2014but nevertheless says \u201cthis reviewer would rather read such a distinctive voice portraying an underexplored landscape than another white author talking about ivory-tower malaise, any day.\u201d"}
{"text":"The novel was shortlisted for the First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award."}
{"text":"Black Girl in Paris is a novel written by American author Shay Youngblood. It was originally published in 2000 by Riverhead Books and then reprinted in 2013 by Blue Cloud Press."}
{"text":"The novel follows Eden Daniels, a black American woman in her mid-20s, who longs to be a writer and escapes to Paris in the mid-1980s."}
{"text":"In 2013 the novel was adapted into a short film of the same name directed by Kiandra Parks and starring Zaraah Abrahams."}
{"text":"In 1986 Eden Daniels, a 26 year old African-American woman decides to move to Paris to follow in the steps of other artists she's admired and try to become a writer."}
{"text":"Eden arrives in Paris when a wave of terrorism sparks an anti-immigrant backlash. Nevertheless, she is able to find work in the ex-pat community and works as an artist's model, an au-pair and a poet's assistant. As she scrapes by Eden dreams of encountering one of her literary heroes, James Baldwin who still lives in Paris and who many of her employers have had brief encounters with."}
{"text":"Eden falls in love with Ving, a white American jazz musician, but their relationship is complicated as they still face prejudice for being an interracial couple. When the family where Eden works as an au-pair leaves for the U.S. and Ving leaves around the same time to visit his ailing mother, Eden is left friendless and penniless. She befriends Luce, a Haitian born woman living in Paris who teaches Eden how to steal in order to survive."}
{"text":"Luce leaves Paris and Ving returns, sending Eden to his friends near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where James Baldwin has an estate. Eden tries to meet him but learns he has returned to Paris. Heartbroken she finally begins to write her story down."}
{"text":"On Eden's last day in Paris she runs into Baldwin leaving a caf\u00e9. He greets her briefly before leaving."}
{"text":"The novel had a mixed reception. \"Salon\" called Youngblood a lyricist but criticized her for \"clich\u00e9d bohemian characters\". \"Publishers Weekly\" called it \"a bold if sometimes self-indulgent memoir-style account of an aspiring writer\"."}
{"text":"Such a Fun Age is a 2019 novel by American author Kiley Reid. It is her debut novel and was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons on December 31, 2019. It tells the story of a young black woman who is wrongly accused of kidnapping while babysitting a white child, and the events that follow the incident. The novel received favorable reviews and was longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize."}
{"text":"Alix Chamberlain is a wealthy blogger and public speaker in her early thirties who has built a brand known as \"LetHer Speak\" around the practice of writing old-fashioned letters to businesses, often in exchange for free product samples, and encouraging women to be assertive. Alix's family has moved from New York City to her hometown of Philadelphia for her husband Peter's job as a television anchor, and her career is stalling as she raises two children and attempts to write her first book. Alix hires Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old African-American college graduate, as a babysitter to care for her three-year-old daughter Briar. Alix also has an infant daughter named Catherine."}
{"text":"Alix tells Emira that she should break up with Kelley because he fetishized black people in high school: he invited Robbie and the cool kids to the house to become friends with them and later broke up with Alix in favor of them. When Emira dismisses her advice, Alix gains access to Emira's email and leaks the video of the grocery store incident. To Emira's shock, it goes viral. Believing that Kelley leaked it, she breaks up with him. Alix comforts her and offers her a full-time job as Briar's nanny, which she accepts. Alix also arranges an interview with Emira and herself on local television."}
{"text":"Minutes before the interview, Emira comes to know that it was in fact Alix who leaked the video. On air, Emira embarrasses Alix by quitting and using the same line that Kelley had used to break up with her in high school. When Alix confronts her, Emira urges Alix to be a better mother to Briar. After the interview airs, Kelley tries to contact Emira but she does not respond."}
{"text":"Years pass and Emira begins working as administrative assistant. She sees Kelley with his black girlfriend and Mrs. Chamberlain with an older Briar but does not approach any of them. Well into her thirties, Emira wonders what she learned from her time at the Chamberlain house and what kind of person Briar will grow up to become."}
{"text":"Reid started writing the novel in 2015, while she was applying to graduate school, and finished it while pursuing her MFA at the University of Iowa. It was during this period that the deaths of Freddie Gray and Philando Castile took place, and Reid said she was \"absolutely inspired by the everyday terror\" but that, in the novel, she wanted to explore \"instances of racial biases that don't end in violence as a way of highlighting those moments that we don't see on the news but still exist every day.\" Reid has also said that the novel was partly inspired by the years she spent in her 20s working as a babysitter."}
{"text":"The novel was published in the United States in hardcover and paperback by G. P. Putnam's Sons on December 31, 2019. It was published in the United Kingdom in hardcover by Bloomsbury Circus, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, on January 7, 2020."}
{"text":"The novel debuted at number three on \"The New York Times\" Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list."}
{"text":"\"Such a Fun Age\" deals with the themes of interracial relations, privilege, millennial anxiety and wealth."}
{"text":"Reid interrogates tropes of the white savior and unknowing racist in everyday life. Throughout the novel, the white characters assume they know what is best for the protagonist, without ever seeing anything from her perspective, and speak about her with a sense of ownership. The novel satirizes what has been described as \"the white pursuit of wokeness\", by having the two main white characters use their relationships with Emira as the battleground through which each intends to prove their racial virtue. Reid explained that she did not think of her characters as inherently bad, conversely, that they \"were dying to help, but kind of going through mental gymnastics to ignore the broken systems that put people where they are to begin with.\""}
{"text":"The novel was very well-received by critics, who described it as having timely themes, authentic dialogue and believable characters. Sara Collins of \"The Guardian\" gave the novel a rave review, calling it \"the calling card of a virtuoso talent\" and writing that it \"skillfully interweaves race-related explorations with astute musings on friendship, motherhood, marriage, love and more.\" It also received praise from \"Kirkus Reviews\" and \"Publishers Weekly\", with the latter describing it as a \"nuanced portrait of a young black woman struggling to define herself apart from the white people in her life who are all too ready to speak and act on her behalf.\""}
{"text":"Hephzibah Anderson of \"The Observer\" criticized the character development of Alix Chamberlain as well as the novel's plot for \"[pivoting] on an almighty coincidence\" but nonetheless called it a \"cracking debut\" and wrote that \"Reid writes with a confidence and verve that produce magnetic prose.\" \"The Boston Globe\" concurred, noting that the second half of the novel was based on a \"contrived\" coincidence but \"once you buy into the path Reid chooses, she deftly ratchets up the tension and the characters always ring true.\""}
{"text":"Lauren Christensen of \"The New York Times Book Review\" gave the novel a mixed review, criticizing the plot's \"many lapses in credibility\" as well as Reid's \"cloying vernacular\"."}
{"text":"The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a debut short story collection by Deesha Philyaw. The book contains nine stories about Black women, church, and sexuality and was released on September 1, 2020 by West Virginia University Press. It was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and received The Story Prize and the PEN\/Faulkner Award for Fiction."}
{"text":"The collection consists of nine stories that explore the intersection of sexuality and Christianity. Black women protagonists appear in each story. Topics covered include infidelity, casual sex, and lesbian relationships."}
{"text":"The title refers to the catch-all term for church-going women that Philyaw learned growing up. These women were prim, conservatively dressed, \"who makes sure not a hair is out of place, never speaks out of line, and does all the right Godly things.\""}
{"text":"Philyaw stated in an interview for \"Richmond Free Press\", \"I see the book as centering Black women in their own stories of the tug of war they experience between their desires and what they may have learned at church.\""}
{"text":"Philyaw was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She was raised attending church and attended services under the denominations of AME, Baptist, Pentecostal, COGIC, and Missionary Baptist Church. Philyaw drew on those experience to write about how the church space influences female sexuality. She no longer attends church services but has fond memories of that time."}
{"text":"\"The Secret Lives of Church Ladies\" received critical acclaim. Marion Wink reviewed the book for \"Star Tribune\" and stated: \"This collection marks the emergence of a bona fide literary treasure.\" Wendeline O. Wright further praised Philyaw in \"Pittsburgh Post-Gazette\": \"\u201cThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies\u201d is an unforgettable look inside the hearts of Black women as they evaluate their relationships \u2014 with God, their families, and themselves.\""}
{"text":"\"Kirkus\" wrote in a starred review, \"No saints exist in these pages, just full-throated, flesh-and-blood women who embrace and redefine love, and their own selves, in powerfully imperfect renditions. Tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.\" In a similarly positive review, \"Publisher's Weekly\" wrote, \"Philyaw\u2019s stories inform and build on one another, turning her characters\u2019 private struggles into a beautiful chorus.\" The nuanced characters were further praised by Jordan Snowden, who described Philyaw's writing in \"Pittsburgh City Paper\": \"She shows these women, these Black women, in spaces they aren\u2019t usually seen \u2014 having sex in a parking lot, in same-sex relationships, going to therapy, as a person filled with longing and desire.\""}
{"text":"In January 2021 it was announced that Tessa Thompson's newly formed production company, Viva Maude, had picked up the collection to be adapted for television. Philyaw is slated to write the adaptation and co-executive produce with Thompson."}
{"text":"Plan B is an unfinished novel published posthumously in America in 1993 by Chester Himes, which is the final volume in the Harlem Cycle. The story is even darker and more nihilistic than the preceding volumes, culminating in a violent revolutionary movement in the streets of America."}
{"text":"The first edition was published in France, in 1983 (Editions lieu commun), translated by Hel\u00e8ne Devaux-Mini\u00e9."}
{"text":"The story differs somewhat from the other volumes of the cycle in being less a detective story and more a surrealistic tale of a racial apocalypse in America. The story hinges on the efforts of community leader Tomsson Black to stir up racial tension in Harlem in order to force a radical change in race relations. The novel begins as a hardboiled detective story, then, when the characters' revolt begins, transitions to apocalyptic fiction."}
{"text":"In an interview, Himes once noted that he had wanted to \"depict the violence that is necessary so that the white community will also give it a little thought, because you know, they're going around playing these games. They haven't given any thought to what would happen if the black people would seriously uprise.\""}
{"text":"Most notably, \"Plan B\" features the death of both of the protagonists of the Harlem Cycle. Gravedigger Jones kills Coffin Ed Johnson in a dramatic final scene, before being killed himself by Tomsson Black. Throughout the story, the usually level-headed Gravedigger gets caught up in the revolutionary fervor, while Coffin Ed is uncharacteristically skeptical and calm."}
{"text":"The Mothers is a debut novel by Brit Bennett. The book follows Nadia, a young woman who left her Southern California hometown years ago after the suicide of her mother and is called back to attend to a family emergency. \"The Mothers\", released on October 11, 2016 by Riverhead Books, received critical acclaim and was a \"New York Times\" bestseller. A film adaptation is being produced by Kerry Washington's production company Simpson Street."}
{"text":"Living in Southern California, 17-year-old Nadia, grieving her mother's suicide, becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Luke, a local pastor's son. She has an abortion and leaves her hometown to attend University of Michigan. Years later, her Christian friend Aubrey begins dating and then marries Luke. In her adulthood Nadia has to return to her hometown for a family emergency and reckon with her past."}
{"text":"The book includes themes of Christianity in the context of the Black church, shame, and motherhood."}
{"text":"Bennett began writing the novel when she was 17 years old. She used many elements of her own life to craft the narrative; she and the protagonist, Nadia, were both high-achievers who maintained close ties to their families even after leaving home for college. Nadia's hometown is based on Bennett's hometown of Oceanside, California, an ethnically-diverse beach town. Bennett continued to work on the novel after leaving for college and while completing her MFA at University of Michigan."}
{"text":"In 2014 Bennett published a viral essay on Jezebel.com called \"I Don\u2019t Know What to Do With Good White People\", shortly after the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Literary agent Julia Kardon read the essay and contacted Bennett to offer her representation to write and sell a book, which became her manuscript, \"The Mothers\"."}
{"text":"\"The Mothers\" was a \"New York Times\" bestseller."}
{"text":"In March 2017 it was announced that Kerry Washington was lead producer on a film adaptation for the novel, to be produced through her company Simpson Street for Warner Bros."}
{"text":"Juneteenth is Ralph Ellison's second novel, published posthumously in 1999 as a 368-page condensation of over 2,000 pages written by him over a period of 40 years. It was originally written without any real organization, and Ellison's longtime friend, biographer and critic John F. Callahan, put the novel together, editing it in the way he thought Ellison would want it to be written."}
{"text":"The fuller version of the manuscript was published as \"Three Days Before the Shooting...\" on February 2, 2010."}
{"text":"Ellison began work on his second novel around 1954, following the publication of Invisible Man."}
{"text":"Ellison claimed to be devastated when part of the original manuscript of \"Juneteenth\" was destroyed by a fire in 1967. However, Arnold Rampersad advanced the opinion that the loss of the crucial, irrecoverable sections of his manuscript appears to have been something Ellison concocted after the fact to justify his lack of progress. In his 2007 biography of Ellison, Rampersad points out that, following the fire, Ellison wrote to critic Nathan Scott of his relief that he still \"fortunately had a full copy\" of all his writing. In different interviews, the lost manuscript pages were described as \"360 pages, and \"500 pages\", and \"about a summer\u2019s worth of revisions\"."}
{"text":"Ellison published eight excerpts from the novel during his lifetime, including an excerpt called \"Juneteenth\" in \"the Quarterly Review of Literature\" in 1965, and the story \"Cadillac Flamb\u00e9\", published in \"American Review\" in 1973 and reprinted many times since, which received considerable critical attention, leading to a lot of interest in the unpublished work. However, although he had written over 2,000 pages by the time of his death, Ellison never finished the novel."}
{"text":"Following Ellison's death, John F. Callahan, named Ellison's literary executor by his widow, was pressed to release the novel, despite the fact that the pages of manuscript were not organized and Ellison had left no notes on how they were to be put together. For this work, Callahan took the central episode from Ellison's manuscripts, and delivered as a single work, with a promise that the full version would be made available at a later time."}
{"text":"The long-awaited novel received mixed reviews. The review in \"The Guardian\" said that although the work was published with the subtitle \"a novel,\" it \"is decidedly not a novel: it lacks a novel's shape, rationale, and self-justifying propulsion.\" \"Publishers Weekly\" acknowledged Callahan's \"difficulties\" in putting the novel together from Ellison's incomplete manuscript, but concluded \"this volume is a visionary tour de force, a lyrical, necessary contribution to America's perennial racial dialogue, and a novel powerfully reinforcing Ellison's place in literary history.\" Scott Saul in \"Boston Review\" states \"The book is more than Ellison fans could expect, yet less than Ellison probably hoped--an ambivalent masterpiece.\""}
{"text":"A fuller version of the manuscript was published as \"Three Days Before the Shooting...\" on February 2, 2010."}
{"text":"Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005."}
{"text":"The novel tells the story of Shori, a 53-year-old member of the Ina species, who appears to be a ten-year-old African-American girl. The Ina are nocturnal, long-lived, and derive sustenance by drinking human blood. Though they are physically superior to humans, both in strength and ability to heal from injury, the Ina depend on humans to survive. Therefore, their relationships are symbiotic, with the Ina's venom providing significant boost to their humans' immune systems and extending their lives up to 200 years. However, withdrawal from this venom will also lead to the human's death."}
{"text":"The story opens as Shori awakens with no knowledge of who or where she is, in a cave and suffering from critical injuries. Although she is burned and has skull trauma, she kills and eats the first creature that approaches her. Eating this creature allows her to heal quickly enough to walk and explore on her own. She runs into the ruins where a construction worker named Wright picks her up on the side of the road; Shori bites Wright because she finds his scent irresistible, and they begin their relationship."}
{"text":"While staying at Wright's uncle's cabin, Shori realizes she's in need of more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to learn more about her past. They eventually meet Iosif, Shori's father, who tells her the burned-out town was once her home where she had lived with her mother and sisters. They also learn that Wright and Shori's mutually beneficial relationship makes Wright Shori's symbiont. Further, Shori's dark skin is the result of a genetic modification: the Ina were experimenting to make their kind resistant to daylight. All other Ina are white-skinned."}
{"text":"Later, before Shori is able to move in with Iosif, his settlement is burned down as Shori's home was. Shori and Wright meet the only two human symbionts who survived, Celia and Brook. Shori adopts Celia and Brook as her own symbionts to save their lives. Their bonding is initially uncomfortable for all of them, however, as symbionts become addicted to the venom of one particular Ina. The four flee to another house that Iosif owns. While at this new house during the day, they are attacked by several men with gasoline and guns. Because of the genetic enhancements made on Shori, she is awake and they are able to escape."}
{"text":"The group travels to the settlement of the Gordon family (old friends of Iosif), where they are welcomed and guarded by human symbionts during the day. The attackers also raid the settlement, but Shori and the human symbionts are able to fight back. They capture three attackers alive. The Gordon family interrogates the intruders and finds that they are the same attackers who killed Shori's parents and have been sent by the Silks, another Ina family. The Gordons suspect the attacks on Shori are motivated by disdain for the genetic experimentation that created her."}
{"text":"One of the most commented aspects of \"Fledgling\" is its unusual type of vampire, the result of Butler's fusion of vampire fiction with science fiction. While the Ina is simply another species coexisting with humanity, the traditional vampire's monstrosity and abnormality routinely symbolizes deviant sexuality and decadence, serves as a foil for humanity, or is a projection of repressed sexual desire or fear of sexual or racial contamination."}
{"text":"Biological rather than supernatural, the Ina do not turn humans into vampires. They are not ruthless, threatening, predatory, intimidating, or generally antagonistic to humans. Instead, they create close-knit Ina-human communities where they cohabitate with selected humans in symbiotic relationships. In fact, as Pramrod Nayar notes, Butler creates an alternate history where humans and Ina have always coexisted in \"non-hierarchic, interdependent and unified ecosystems\"."}
{"text":"Aside from their unusual relationships with humans, the Ina is quite ordinary. Steven Shaviro describes them as having \"a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things\u2014just as any group of human beings does\". Butler even renders the Ina less than perfect in that they are prone to the intolerance and bigotry usually reserved for humans."}
{"text":"Some critics view Butler's decision to endow her protagonist with a larger dose of melanin than what is normal for the Ina as a metaphor for how the concept of race is created. Ali Brox, for example, points out that Shori is not just \"made black\" biologically, but also socially when Ina fixate on her difference. Thus, Shori's skin color forces her to defend herself from a hostile world before she has even learned about institutionalized hierarchies."}
{"text":"Ina bias against humans also serves as a comment on the history of human bigotry, specifically the prejudices of whites against blacks. As Sanchez-Taylor explains, \"[t]he displacement of the notion of race into a species conflict allows Butler to have a black protagonist and have a discussion of intolerance without the need to partake in the history of human racism\". In \"Fledgling\", this racial discussion takes on a hopeful tone when the majority of the Ina acknowledge Shori as one of their own."}
{"text":"Additionally, endowing Shori with a specific racial identity serves to deconstruct negative stereotypes of blackness. As a black protagonist, she becomes the vehicle through which Butler articulates the lack of Black in the vampire genre and challenges traditional notions of white males as heroes. Moreover, because her blackness was conceived as an evolutionary advantage, it inverts racist notions of blackness as a biological contaminant that leads to degeneracy."}
{"text":"The vampire protagonist of \"Fledgling\" is even more unusual, as she has been genetically enhanced. While the Ina are stereotypically white, as is traditional for vampires, Shori's genetic makeup includes human melanin, which renders her skin brown, a necessary trait for her kind to be able to survive exposure to the sun. Sanchez-Taylor suggests that Butler's choice in making Shori dark-skinned aligns \"Fledgling\" 's narrative with the Afrofuturist idea of defying the predominantly white vampire stereotype, such as those represented in Bram Stoker's or Anne Rice's novels. Such characters traditionally symbolize white masculinity; instead, Butler replaces them with a black, female main character."}
{"text":"Additionally, Shori is portrayed as less intimidating than stereotypical vampires. As Melissa Strong notes, Shori's diminutive size makes her seem non-threatening. Her treatment of symbionts is kind and understanding: instead of considering her symbionts as victims or pawns, Shori's relationship with them reflects mutuality and balance."}
{"text":"Several scholars have noted how Ina discrimination against Shori doubles as commentary on human racist practices. According to Steven Shaviro, racism is the major factor in the conflict between Shori and Ina speciesists such as the Silk family, who view humans as enemies who have annihilated Ina throughout history. These Ina maintain that Ina and human must remain separate species with the Ina as the dominant partner. They consider Shori to be somehow biologically different to the rest of the Ina population, as not even belonging to the same species as them. They refuse to see the shared characteristics between Shori and the rest of the Ina; instead, they deride her because of her difference."}
{"text":"Likewise, humans crave intimacy with one particular Ina after they have been infected by her or his venomous bite, and may die when they lose their Ina. Butler devotes several moments in the novel to portray the discomfort this required loss of agency causes in the human symbionts. Nevertheless, \"Fledgling\" is the first time that Butler illustrates a co-dependent relationship from the point of view of the dominating partner, unlike in previous works such as her novel \"Dawn\" or her celebrated short story \"Bloodchild\"."}
{"text":"Scholars have linked \"Fledgling\"s mutualistic symbiosis to various theoretical positions. Pramrod Nayar sees it as a fictional depiction of the relationship that professor Donna Haraway defines as \"companion species\" in \"Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists\". Joy Sanchez-Taylor and Shari Evans recognize it as a form of social commentary: human beings must move away from parasitic, hierarchical relationships and toward symbiosis with each other and other species. Critic Susana Morris connects \"Fledgling\"s symbiotic relationships to the Afrofuturistic feminist desire to portray liberation from current forms of hegemonic dominance. Thus, the \"cooperation, interdependence, and complex understandings of power\" that mutualistic symbiosis represents becomes Butler's \"futurist social model, one that is fundamentally at odds with racism, sexism, and sectarian violence\"."}
{"text":"\"Fledgling\" challenges traditional expectations of sexual categorization and proposes alternative ways for individuals to relate to one another by having Ina sexual norms override human norms. Ina-human sexual relationships are polyamorous, with one Ina as the primary partner of several male and female human symbionts. Also, symbionts often engage in same-sex and\/or opposite-sex relationships with other symbionts. Further, the Ina mate in family-based groups\u2014a group of sisters mating with a group of brothers from a different family. An Ina household, therefore, blurs the boundaries between familial and erotic love by having its members involved with each other sexually."}
{"text":"Butler highlights the strangeness of the Ina sexual arrangements through the reactions of Shori's first symbiont, Wright. According to Melissa Strong, Wright responds to Shori's pansexuality with biphobia; for him, proper sexuality has clear categories: male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality."}
{"text":"Ultimately, Butler's inclusion of alternative sexualities serves to erode rigid hierarchies. Strong explains that the fusing of family and sexual relations destabilizes the traditional relationship between slave and master. Similarly, Susana Morris argues that, in the spirit of Afrofuturistic feminism, \"Fledgling\"s queer sexualities \"uncouple dominance from power\", so that the patriarchal hold over those marginalized is replaced by \"coalition and power sharing\"."}
{"text":"Likewise, Pramrod Nayar believes that Shori's loss is what makes her the best of all possible Ina, and therefore a symbol of the future. Butler proposes that vampires should become less vampiric by attaining more human qualities such as emotional attachments and sense of community. Meanwhile, humans should also lose certain aspects of themselves as well, such as their vulnerability to disease and tendency to be sexually possessive. Only by losing their weak characteristics and gaining stronger ones, the human and vampire species are able to evolve and improve. Fledgling creates a progressive plan by converting Ina and human into a companionate species through the adoption of qualities of the Other."}
{"text":"These complications of agency, Bast argues, mean that \"Fledgling \"is \"openly asking whether the highest degree of agency is automatically the most desirable state of being or whether there is a higher potential for happiness in choosing a specific kind of dependence\"."}
{"text":"In an interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman for \"Democracy Now!\", Butler explained that she had written \"Fledgling\" as a diversion after becoming overwhelmed by the grimness of her Parable series. To distract herself, she had read vampire fantasy novels, which tempted her to try writing one. As she explained in an interview with Allison Keyes, it took her a while to find the focus of the novel until a friend suggested that what vampires wanted, besides human blood, was the ability to walk in the sun. She then decided to create vampires as a separate species and have them engineer the capacity to withstand sunlight by adding human melanin to their DNA."}
{"text":"Though \"Fledgling\" is unique on its take on what motivates vampires, it is not the first story to have a black vampire as its protagonist. In the 1970s, the films Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream depicted a black vampire as the nemesis of white supremacists. In the 1990s, the Blade film series, based on a Marvel Comics character, introduced a black human-vampire superhero who can tolerate sunlight. In addition, according to scholars Joy Sanchez-Taylor and Susana M. Morris, \"Fledgling\" belongs to a flourishing tradition of Afrofuturistic black vampire fiction, as represented by Jewelle Gomez's novel \"The Gilda Stories\", as well as by the series \"African Immortals\" by Tananarive Due and \"The Vampire Huntress Legend\" by Leslie Esdaile Banks."}
{"text":"\"Fledgling\" received mostly positive feedback. Novelist Junot Diaz declared it his \"book of the year\", calling it \"[a] harrowing meditation on dominance, sex, addiction, miscegenation and race that completely devours the genre which gave rise to it\". Butler scholar Sandra Y. Govan pronounced it \"[a]n extremely well-crafted science fiction story... [that] engages us and is exciting because it invokes and riffs upon vampire myth and legend while wearing a number of masks\u2014murder mystery, crime novel, coming-of-age, innocence-to-experience, initiation, quest tale, and outsider\/survivor novel\"."}
{"text":"Reviewers also commented favorably on Butler's reinvention of the vampire figure, with Ron Charles of \"The Washington Post\" arguing that \"\"Fledgling\" doesn't just resurrect the pale trappings of vampire lore, it completely transforms them in a startlingly original story about race, family and free will.\" While reviewing the novel for the journal \"Gothic Studies\", Charles L. Crow noted that \"[while] \"Fledgling\" may be the least Gothic of Butler's fictions... Butler makes unsettling demands of the reader, as always, and we must at the beginning accept as narrator and heroine a vampire whose first act is to kill and eat a man who is trying to help her.\""}
{"text":"The Octavia E. Butler Papers at the Huntington Library include multiple drafts for potential sequels of \"Fledgling\" which continue to follow the Shori and her growing family as they navigate their relationships and both human and Ina societies. New characters would have included additional human symbionts, the newest of whom, Darya, has a history of trauma and abuse. Possible conflicts may have included a return of the Silk family, seeking revenge on Shori. Possible versions included \"Asylum\" or \"Shadow Rise\" (alternatively \"Shadow Memory\"). In a journal entry in December 2005, Butler wrote, \"I don't want to spend the last years of my life writing Shori stories but a Shori story is what I have now.\""}
{"text":"My Soul to Keep is a 1997 novel by American writer Tananarive Due. It is the first book in Due's African Immortals Series and was followed by \"The Living Blood\" (2001). The third book in the series, \"Blood Colony\", was published in 2008."}
{"text":"In 2004, it was announced that a film version of this book is in production with actor Blair Underwood."}
{"text":"The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name."}
{"text":"The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000\u20132009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's \"best-loved novels.\""}
{"text":"Celie is a poor, uneducated 14-year-old girl living in the Southern United States in the early 1900s. She writes letters to God because her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso has already impregnated Celie once, which resulted in the birth of a boy named Adam, whom Alphonso abducted. Celie thinks Alphonso killed Adam. Celie then has a second child, and Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed. The second child is a girl named Olivia, but Alphonso takes the baby away shortly after birth."}
{"text":"Celie and her younger sister, 12-year-old Nettie, learn a man identified only as Mister wants to marry Nettie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, instead arranging for Mister to marry Celie. Mister, a widower, needing someone to care for his children and keep his house, eventually accepts the offer. Mister physically, sexually, and verbally abuses Celie, and all his children mistreat her as well."}
{"text":"Shortly thereafter, Nettie runs away from Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie's house, where Mister makes sexual advances toward her. Celie then advises Nettie to seek assistance from a well-dressed black woman that she saw in the general store a while back; the woman has unknowingly adopted Olivia and is the only black woman Celie has ever seen with money of her own. Nettie is forced to leave after promising to write. Celie, however, never receives any letters and concludes her sister is dead."}
{"text":"Shug Avery, a jazz and blues singer and Mister's long-time mistress falls ill, and Mister takes her into his house. Celie, who has been fascinated by photos of Shug she found in Mister's belongings, is thrilled to have her there. Mister's father expresses disapproval of the arrangement, reminding Mister that Shug has three out-of-wedlock children, though Mister implies to him he is those children's father. Mister's father then leaves in disgust. While Shug is initially rude to Celie, who has taken charge of nursing her, the two women become friends, and Celie soon finds herself infatuated with Shug."}
{"text":"Frustrated by Harpo's domineering behavior, Sofia moves out, taking her children with her. Several months later, Harpo opens a juke joint where a fully recovered Shug performs nightly. Shug decides to stay when she learns Mister beats Celie when she is away. Shug and Celie grow closer."}
{"text":"Sofia returns for a visit and promptly gets into a fight with Harpo's new girlfriend, Squeak, knocking Squeak's teeth out. In town one day, while Sofia is enjoying a day out with her new boyfriend, a prizefighter, and their respective children, she gets into a physical fight with the mayor after his wife, Miss Millie, insults Sofia and her children. The police arrive and brutally beat Sofia, leaving her with a cracked skull, broken ribs, her face rendered nearly unrecognizable, and blind in one eye. She is subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison."}
{"text":"Squeak, mixed-race and Sheriff Hodges' illegitimate niece, attempts to blackmail the sheriff into releasing Sofia, resulting in her being raped by her uncle. Squeak cares for Sofia's children while she is incarcerated, and the two women develop a friendship. Sofia is eventually released and begins working for Miss Millie, which she detests."}
{"text":"Despite being newly married to a man called Grady, Shug instigates a sexual relationship with Celie on her next visit. One night Shug asks Celie about her sister, and Shug helps Celie recover letters from Nettie that Mister has been hiding from her for decades. The letters indicate Nettie befriended a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, the well-dressed woman Celie saw in the store. Nettie eventually accompanied them to Africa to do missionary work. Samuel and Corrine have unwittingly adopted both Adam and Olivia. Corrine, noticing her adopted children resemble Nettie, wonders if Samuel fathered the children with her. Increasingly suspicious, Corrine tries to limit Nettie's role in her family."}
{"text":"Through her letters, Nettie reveals she has become disillusioned with her missionary work. Corrine became ill with a fever, and Nettie asked Samuel to tell her how he adopted Olivia and Adam. Realizing Adam and Olivia are Celie's children, Nettie then learned Alphonso is actually her and Celie's stepfather. Their actual father was a store owner that white men lynched because they resented his success. She also learned their mother suffered a mental collapse after her husband's death and that Alphonso exploited the situation to control their mother's considerable wealth."}
{"text":"Nettie confessed to Samuel and Corrine she is the children's biological aunt. The gravely ill Corrine refused to believe her until Nettie reminds her of her previous encounter with Celie in the store. Later, Corrine died, finally having accepted Nettie's story. Meanwhile, Celie visits Alphonso, who confirms Nettie's story. Celie begins to lose some of her faith in God, which she confides to Shug, who explains to Celie her own unique religious philosophy. Shug helps Celie realize God is not someone who has power over her like the rest of the men in Celie's life. Rather, God is an \u201cit\u201d and not a \u201cwho.\""}
{"text":"Having had enough of her husband's abuse, Celie decides to leave Mister along with Shug and Squeak, who is considering a singing career of her own. Celie puts a curse on Mister before leaving him for good, settling in Tennessee and supporting herself as a seamstress."}
{"text":"Alphonso dies, Celie inherits his land and moves back into her childhood home. Around this time, Shug falls in love with Germaine, a member of her band, and this news crushes Celie. Shug travels with Germaine, all the while writing postcards to Celie. Celie pledges to love Shug even if Shug does not love her back."}
{"text":"Celie learns that Mister, suffering from a considerable decline in fortunes after Celie left him, has changed dramatically, and Celie begins to call him by his first name, Albert. Albert proposes that they marry \"in the spirit as well as in the flesh,\" but Celie declines."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel marry and prepare to return to America. Before they leave, Adam marries Tashi, an African girl. Following an African tradition, Tashi undergoes the painful rituals of female circumcision and facial scarring. In solidarity, Adam undergoes the same facial scarring ritual."}
{"text":"As Celie realizes that she is content in her life without Shug, Shug returns, having ended her relationship with Germaine. Nettie, Samuel, Olivia, Adam, and Tashi all arrive at Celie's house. Nettie and Celie reunite after 30 years and introduce one another to their respective families."}
{"text":"\"The Color Purple\" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983, making Walker the first black woman to win the prize. Walker also won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1983. Mel Watkins of the \"New York Times Book Review\" wrote that it is a \"striking and consummately well-written novel\", praising its powerful emotional impact and epistolary structure."}
{"text":"Though the novel has garnered critical acclaim, it has also been the subject of controversy. It is 17th on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged or banned books. Commonly cited justifications for banning the book include sexual explicitness, explicit language, violence, and homosexuality. The book received greater scrutiny amidst controversy surrounding the release of the film adaptation in 1985. The controversy centered around the depiction of black men, which some critics saw as feeding stereotypical narratives of black male violence, while others found the representation compelling and relatable."}
{"text":"On November 5, 2019, the \"BBC News\" listed \"The Color Purple\" on its list of the 100 most influential novels."}
{"text":"The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1985. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, Danny Glover as Albert, and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia. Though nominated for eleven Academy Awards, it won none. This perceived snubbing ignited controversy because many critics considered it the best picture that year, including Roger Ebert."}
{"text":"On December 1, 2005, a musical adaptation of the novel and film with lyrics and music by Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell and Allee Willis, and book by Marsha Norman opened at The Broadway Theatre in New York City. The show was produced by Scott Sanders, Quincy Jones, Harvey Weinstein, and Oprah Winfrey, who was also an investor."}
{"text":"In 2008 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio adaptation of the novel in ten 15-minute episodes as a \"Woman's Hour\" serial, with Nadine Marshall as Celie, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Nina Sosanya and Eamonn Walker. The script was by Patricia Cumper, and in 2009 the production received the Sony Radio Academy Awards Silver Drama Award."}
{"text":"As part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), the author declined publication of the book in Israel in 2012. This decision was criticized by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who argued that Walker \"resorted to bigotry and censorship against Hebrew-speaking readers of her writings\". Walker, an ardent pro-Palestinian activist, said in a letter to Yediot Books that Israel practices apartheid and must change its policies before her works can be published there."}
{"text":"Singh, Sonal, and Sushma Gupta. \u201cCelie\u2019s Emancipation in the Novel The Color Purple.\u201d International Transactions in Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 2, Dec. 2010, pp. 218\u2013221.Humanities International Complete."}
{"text":"Tahir, Ary S. \u201cGender Violence in Toni Morrison\u2019s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker\u2019s The Color Purple.\u201d Journal of Language and Literature Education, no. 11, 2014, pp. 1\u201319. Literature Resource Center, doi:10.12973\/jlle.11.243."}
{"text":"Pym is the third novel by American author Mat Johnson, published on March 1, 2011. A satirical fantasy inspired by \"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket\", Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, the book explores racial politics and identity in America, and Antarctica. The novel was written over a period of nine years and has been well received by critics, who have praised its lighthearted and humorous style of social criticism."}
{"text":"\"Pym\" takes its title from Edgar Allan Poe's \"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket\", \"a strange tale of shipwrecks, mutiny and a mysterious island inhabited by black-skinned people whose teeth are even black, and it ends abruptly at the South Pole with Pym facing haunting white figures\". Poe's only novel, it is the favorite book of Johnson's protagonist, Chris Jaynes, an African-American professor of literature, and his obsession with it leads him on his own journey to Antarctica."}
{"text":"According to Johnson, creating the book involved \"9 years of writing, 16 drafts, [and] 3 deletion attempts\". While working on \"Pym\", Johnson also finished four critically acclaimed graphic novels \u2013 \"Hellblazer: Papa Midnite\" (2005), \"Incognegro\" (2008), \"Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story\" (2010), and \"Right State\". In an interview with Mike Emery, Johnson stated that there were many times when he thought that \"Pym\" \"was taking too much of my time, and it was taking me in the wrong direction\". He credits his wife, journalist Meera Bowman Johnson (to whom he dedicated \"Pym\"), and friends with persuading him to continue with the novel."}
{"text":"Johnson's website features a list of books by other notable writers inspired by Poe's open-ended novel since its publication in 1838, including Herman Melville's \"Moby Dick\", H. P. Lovecraft's \"At the Mountains of Madness\", and Jules Verne's \"An Antarctic Mystery\" \u2013 \"the most pragmatic and literal sequel to \"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym\" and also the worst sequel [\u2026] Come for the novelty, stay for the unbridled racism\". The narrative of \"Pym\" also includes elements from Verne's and Lovecraft's Poe-inspired works."}
{"text":"In \"Pym\", Johnson's protagonist named a course on Poe he was teaching in reference to Toni Morrison's 1992 collection of essays \"Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination\", in which she explores the theory that for Poe, whiteness equaled perfection. Professor Jaynes's course, \"Dancing With the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind\", attempted to trace the roots of America's failure to become a post-racial society to classic white texts, with a focus on Poe."}
{"text":"Chris Jaynes is the only African-American professor of literature at a liberal Manhattan college. Refusing to limit his teaching to the African-American canon and serve on the college diversity committee, he is denied tenure. His obsession with Poe's novel comes to a head when his ancient book dealer introduces him to a copy of \"The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself.\", \"an unpublished 19th-century manuscript that suggests Poe's novel, which was partially set in Antarctica, was drawn closely from truth.\" Jaynes assembles an all-black mining crew, and embarks on an expedition to the South Pole in search of Poe's fabled island of Tsalal, the \"great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland ... uncorrupted by whiteness.\""}
{"text":"Jaynes and Garth wake up in a saturated paradise and are greeted by Thomas Karvel, the Master of Light, and his wife, Mrs. Karvel. They are given a tour of the Biodome and are given three-fifths of a home, and the Karvels agree to let them stay only if they raise crops in the plot of land they are given."}
{"text":"Because the Biodome uses so much energy, the heat from its machinery is melting the ice caves of the Snow Honkies. Both Pym and Nathaniel arrive with all of the Snow Honkies and attempt to persuade the Karvels into using less energy and relinquishing Jaynes and Garth, as they are property of Sausage Nose. Mrs. Karvel invites the Snow Honkies to a feast, which takes place on the rooftop of the Biodome. The mining crew (except Nathaniel), Jaynes, and Mrs. Karvel cook all of the remaining instant food, and cover the dessert with rat poison, calling them \"sprinkles\"."}
{"text":"During the feast, Mrs. Karvel asks Jaynes to bring out more dessert, and Sausage Nose and a child follow him inside the Biodome. The child dies in a river from the rat poison, and Sausage Nose realizes the trick that is being played on the Snow Honkies. He charges at Jaynes and is killed by an ax to the head, courtesy of Garth. To avoid suspicions of Sausage Nose going missing, Jaynes forces Garth into a robe and smears toothpaste on his face and hands. The Snow Honkies discover that something is amiss and that Garth is not Sausage Nose at all. The Snow Honkies begin to attack the humans when an earthquake occurs, killing all except Jaynes, Garth, and Pym."}
{"text":"The novel then becomes a number of journal entries about the journey to Tsalal by raft, in which Pym dies. Jaynes covers Pym's face with a black cloth, and they arrive at Tsalal, which is not an island of blackness, as Poe describes, but instead of a place of color and most notably of people with brown skin."}
{"text":"The Secret Life of Bees is a fiction book by the American author Sue Monk Kidd. Set in 1964, it is a coming-of-age story about loss and betrayal. The book received critical acclaim and was a \"New York Times\" bestseller. It won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards (Paperback), and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction."}
{"text":"The book was later adapted into a film directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood."}
{"text":"Set in 1964 in the fictitious town of Sylvan, South Carolina, \"The Secret Life of Bees\" tells the story of a 14-year-old white girl, Lily Melissa Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. Lily lives in a house with her abusive father, whom she refers to as T. Ray. They have a no-nonsense maid, Rosaleen, who is a mother figure for Lily."}
{"text":"Lily eventually meets Zach, August's godson. They soon develop intimate feelings for each other. They share goals with each other while working the hives. Both Lily and Zach find their goals nearly impossible to meet but still encourage each other to attempt them. Zach wants to be the \"ass-busting lawyer\", which means he would be the first black attorney in the area. Lily wants to be a short story writer."}
{"text":"A vigil is held that lasts four days. In that time, Zach is freed from jail with no charges, and black cloth is draped over the beehives to symbolize the mourning. May's suicide letter is found and in it she says, \"It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.\" August interprets this as urging June to marry Neil. May is later buried. Life begins to turn back to normal after a time of grieving, bringing the Boatwright house back together. June, after several rejections, agrees to give her hand in marriage to Neil. Zach vows to Lily that they will be together someday and that they will both achieve their goals."}
{"text":"Lily finally finds out the truth about her mother. August was her mother's nanny, and helped raise her. After her marriage to T. Ray began to sour, Deborah left and went to stay with the Boatwrights. She eventually decided to leave him permanently and returned to their house to collect Lily. While Deborah was packing to leave, T. Ray returned home. Their ensuing argument turned into a physical fight during which Deborah got a gun. After a brief struggle, the gun fell to the floor, which Lily picked up and the gun accidentally discharged, killing Deborah."}
{"text":"While Lily is coming to terms with this information, T. Ray shows up at the Boatwright residence, also known as the pink house, to take her back home. Lily refuses, and T. Ray flies into an enraged rampage. He has a violent flashback which brings him around. August steps in and offers to let Lily stay with her. T. Ray gives in and agrees. However, right before T. Ray leaves the Boatwright house, Lily asks him what really happened the day her mother died. T. Ray confirms that Lily was the one to, accidentally, kill her mother Deborah."}
{"text":"The novel has many themes, including religion, labour, nature, racism, orphanhood and abandonment, mental health issues and suicide. Lily's search for a mother figure is a part of the greater journey into her own identity. The Bildungsroman showcases Lily's struggle to understand her role in her family and the world and work through her trauma. Another theme is the historical setting and the racism in 1960s southern United States. The novel mentions police mistreatment of Black people, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the controversy of interracial relations. April and May, as well as Lily's mother, are affected by various mental illnesses. Although this is not stated directly, May exhibits symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (hyperempathy, restricted and stereotyped behaviour, speech abnormalities)."}
{"text":"There are a couple big symbols and motifs in \u201cThe Secret Life of Bees.\" One major symbol is the bees and bee-related objects. Bees are a main symbol and motif in the novel. Bees are a symbol of two main things: Guidance and the power of a female community. This is seen in the theme. A major theme is that Lily is looking for a connection to her mother or some mother figure. In the story, there are many strong women she meets. She not only grows up with Rosalee, who is a surrogate mother to Lily, but she also meets the Boatwright Sister and the Daughters of Mary who enhance this symbol of power in a female community in relation to bees."}
{"text":"Bees can also symbolize organization or \u201cliving in a civilized community.\u201d This can be connected to the black community and specifically the Boatwright sisters in this novel. Bees are very organized, and every bee needs to do its job. In the novel, there is a quote which says, \u201cwhen a queen bee is taken from a hive, the other bees notice her absence\u201d and it is very similar with the Boatwright sisters. Once May\u2019s twin, April, died, May was never the same. She was emotionally sensitive after her twin passed. Once May took her own life, the Boatwright sisters, once again, had to learn how to move on and live with a loss and \u201cmissing bees.\u201d"}
{"text":"Honey represents wisdom and knowledge. In the plot, Lily is looking for the black Mary that is on a honey jar, and after finding the source of this honey, The Boatwright Sisters take Lily and Rosaleen in, and begin to share their wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge about bees, life, Lily\u2019s dad, T. Ray, and Lily\u2019s mother, Deborah."}
{"text":"The reception of the book was generally positive. Although the novel does include the underlying theme of the civil rights movement, \"USA Today\" felt the novel focused more on Lily's journey towards \"self-acceptance, faith and freedom\". The novel was originally published in 2001, and has since sold more than six million copies and has been published in 35 countries. It also stayed on the \"New York Times\" best seller list for two and a half years. In 2004, it was named the \"Book Sense Paperback of the Year\". It was also one of \"Good Morning America\"'s \"Read-This\" Book club picks, and was nominated for the Orange Prize in England."}
{"text":"The book was adapted into a film in 2008, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and produced by Will Smith, with Jada Pinkett Smith as the executive producer. Queen Latifah played August Boatwright, Dakota Fanning played Lily, Alicia Keys played June Boatwright, Jennifer Hudson played Rosaleen, and Sophie Okonedo played May Boatwright."}
{"text":"The book has been adapted as a musical. A workshop was produced by New York Stage and Film & Vassar in 2017. The world premiere musical adaptation of \"The Secret Life of Bees\" was held at the Off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Company on May 12, 2019 in previews, with the official opening on June 13. The musical's book is written by Lynn Nottage, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. The musical is directed by Sam Gold and features Saycon Sengbloh as Rosaleen, Elizabeth Teeter as Lily, and LaChanze, Eisa Davis and Anastacia McCleskey as the Boatwight beekeeping sisters."}
{"text":"The Living Blood is a novel by writer Tananarive Due. It is the second book in Due's \"African Immortals Series\". It is preceded by \"My Soul to Keep\", which was published in 1997, and is followed by \"Blood Colony\", which was published in 2008."}
{"text":"The Sellout is a 2015 novel by Paul Beatty published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK by Oneworld Publications in 2016. The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and muses about the state of racial relations in the U.S. today. In October 2016, it won the Man Booker Prize, making Beatty the first US writer to win that award."}
{"text":"Published in 2015, \"The Sellout\" was the latest in Paul Beatty\u2019s body of work that explores racial identity in America and the pervasive historical effects of racism. Beatty\u2019s other notable works include \"The White Boy Shuffle\", \"Tuff\", and \"Slumberland\". Beatty has stated his motivation for writing the novel was that \"[he] was broke\". Although \"The Sellout\" was not written in response to any specific event, the novel was released during a time of racial reckoning surrounding multiple instances of police brutality and the Ferguson, Missouri protests."}
{"text":"\"The Sellout\" is a fictitious, satirical novel about racial relations in the U.S. Beatty utilizes stereotypes and parody throughout the story to inject social commentary. Beatty\u2019s other works are mostly humorous as well, but Beatty has claimed that he does not view himself as a satirical author."}
{"text":"The novel was well received by critics, who praised its humor, ostensibly satirical content, and rich social commentary. In \"The Guardian\", Elisabeth Donnelly described it as \"a masterful work that establishes Beatty as the funniest writer in America\", while reviewer Reni Eddo-Lodge called it a \"whirlwind of a satire\", going on to say: \"Everything about \"The Sellout\"s plot is contradictory. The devices are real enough to be believable, yet surreal enough to raise your eyebrows.\" The \"HuffPost\" concluded: \"\"The Sellout\" is a hilarious, pop-culture-packed satire about race in America. Beatty writes energetically, providing insight as often as he elicits laughs.\""}
{"text":"Historian Amanda Foreman, chair of the judges of the Man Booker prize, said: \"\"The Sellout\" is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well, and it plunges into the heart of contemporary American society and, with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain, both manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow, and while both making us laugh, making us wince."}
{"text":"It is both funny and painful at the same time and it is really a novel of our times.\""}
{"text":"Beatty has indicated surprise that critics refer to the novel as a comic one, indicating his belief that discussing the comic aspects of the novel prevents critics from having to discuss its more serious themes."}
{"text":"\"The Sellout\" was the first American book to win the prestigious Man Booker prize, an award traditionally reserved for English-language literature not from the U.S. The contest began considering American literature in 2002."}
{"text":"\"The Sellout\" was published in 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and UK publishing house Oneworld Publications."}
{"text":"The Land is a novel written by Mildred D. Taylor, published in 2001. It is the fifth and penultimate book of the Logan Family saga that began with \"Song of the Trees\" (1975). It is a prequel to the whole series that recounts the life of Cassie Logan's grandfather Paul-Edward as he grows from a nine-year-old boy into a man in his mid-twenties. This book won the 2002 Coretta Scott King Author Award and the 2002 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction."}
{"text":"This was originally the final book in the series before the release of \"All the Days Past, All the Days to Come\" in 2020 which continues the story of the Logan family chronologically from the last book, \"The Road to Memphis\" set twenty years later."}
{"text":"\"The Land\" follows the life of Paul-Edward Logan. Paul is the child of a white man and a woman with Black and Native American ancestry. Paul has three entries from Paul's journal, after the main story ends. The dialogue uses the Southern dialect from the 1870s and 1880s."}
{"text":"Paul and Mitchell are working in a lumber camp and wish to escape. The pair start their journey together, but they decide to separate to avoid drawing attention to themselves. While they are separated, Mitchell goes to more lumber camps, and Paul's eyes land upon J. T. Hollenbeck's land. Upon seeing this land, Paul knows that this is \"The Land\". His land. The book then goes on to describe life in different types of work camps. The story follows Paul as he works at a general store owned by Luke Sawyer, and as a woodworker in a small town called Vicksburg."}
{"text":"Eventually, Paul and Mitchell meet a man by the name of Filmore Granger and make a deal to work for the possession of 40 acres. Although it is not The Land, clearing the forty will help Paul obtain the money needed for J.T. Hollenbeck's land. A deal was struck between Paul and Mr. Granger that stated, if Paul could clear the forty within about two years, Paul and Mitchell would own the forty."}
{"text":"After a few months of working hard at the forty, Paul realizes that he needs the help of some hired hands. Mitchell suggests Tom Bee, with whom he had worked a lumber camp. A white boy Paul had met before, and a young black boy named Nathan Perry, who later becomes Paul's brother-in-law are also hired hands. For a while, a white boy by the name of Wade Jamison helps Paul clear the forty."}
{"text":"In Legacy, Paul's father was sick when Paul takes his boys back to see his family. He saw Robert, Hammond, Cassie, and Cassie's husband Howard. Though Paul had visited Hammond in his store several times over the years, Paul had never heard from brothers Robert and George. No one had heard from George in years. The day after Paul arrived home, his father died. Paul then bought the other 200 acres of Hollenbeck land, from Wade Jamison."}
{"text":"Mildred D. Taylor's novels are often based on stories that she read, heard, or was told about her family's history. \"I remember my grandparents' house, the house my great-grandfather had built at the turn of the century, and I remember the adults talking about the past. As they talked, I began to visualize all the family who had once known \"The Land\" and I felt as if I knew them too,\" Taylor explained."}
{"text":"Mildred Taylor, \"The Land\". Penguin: New York, 2001."}
{"text":"Operation Burning Candle is a novel by Blyden Jackson published in 1973. It was his debut novel. It describes a political conspiracy led by a group called the Black Warriors, whose leader is Vietnam War veteran and Harlem native Captain Aaron Rogers. The conspiracy does not appear clear until more than halfway through the novel and refers to a traumatic event to galvanize the black community in the US to take control of their own destiny. The novel culminates with a series of killings at a political convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City."}
{"text":"The title of the book refers to the three part plan initiated by the Black Warriors. No matter where they go, they will be welcomed in to the homes of members of the black community who burn candles in their home as a sign of solidarity and refuge."}
{"text":"The novel begins with the death of Harlem native and Vietnam War veteran Captain Aaron Rogers. He has supposedly been killed in Vietnam and his body has been flown back to the US for burial. Suspicion is created when Rogers' sister Sissy (Janice) claims to have seen Aaron in a car in lower Manhattan. She and her brother Tommy go to the funeral parlor where the body of Aaron is in a coffin. They discover that the body is not of their brother at all, but someone else entirely."}
{"text":"While Sissy and Tommy are discovering the truth about their brother, Police detective Dan Roberts, former Korean War veteran and current law school student as well as member of the NYPD's Special Operations Unit is investigating a series of seemingly unrelated yet unusual crimes, including a number of bank robberies and a subway malfunction and shutdown."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, firebrand governor of Mississippi Josiah Brace is getting ready for the Democratic National Convention scheduled to occur in just a few days in Madison Square Garden. Brace is a divisive figure who is opposed to the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s as well as school busing. He is ambitious and hopes to be nominated as his party's presidential candidate at the convention."}
{"text":"Ultimately, using well trained black Vietnam War soldiers, Aaron Rogers formulates a plan that will culminate in a monumental event of political violence that will transform American society."}
{"text":"The novel which was written during the late 1960s and early 1970s reflects many of the themes prevalent in US society during the time period. Written in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, urban riots, the Vietnam War, the political assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, it reflects the political paranoia of the period. At the same time the novel is a call to black unity and cooperation in order to transform the political power structure. Many of the novel's themes were addressed in films of the period including Uptight and The Spook Who Sat By the Door. Its treatment of the black soldier's experience during the Vietnam War is reflected in Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods."}
{"text":"Romiette and Julio is a young adult novel by Sharon Draper, published in 1999 by Atheneum Books. It is an updated version of \"Romeo and Juliet\" by William Shakespeare. Many of the characters in Draper's novel closely parallel those in Shakespeare's play. The plot updates the family feud between the Capulets and Montagues to reflect modern racial tensions between African-Americans and Hispanics in the United States. The book received mixed reviews."}
{"text":"This story begins with African American teenager Romiette Cappelle awaking from a recurring nightmare in which she is drowning in fire and water. Just before waking she hears an unknown male voice speaking to her. Although frightened by the nightmare, she wonders whether the voice could be the voice of her soulmate."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, Julio Montague, a Hispanic teenager has just moved to town (Cincinnati, Ohio) from Corpus Christi, Texas, and the following day is his first day attending the same school as Romiette. On his first day he is involved in an altercation with Ben, a local boy, and the two end up becoming friends after Ben declines to implicate Julio when questioned by the school's principal. When Julio gets home that afternoon, he logs into a chatroom with the screen name \"spanishlover\" and starts to chat anonymously with \"afroqueen,\" who he later finds is Romiette. Meanwhile, Romiette excitedly tells Destiny, her best friend, about her online chat with \"spanishlover.\" Romiette and Julio continue to chat online, have a lunch date, and eventually fall in love with each other."}
{"text":"Their relationship provokes the ire of a local gang\u2014the \"Devil Dogs\"\u2014who disapprove of an African American girl dating a Hispanic boy. Makala, a member of the gang, threatens Romiette on several occasions. Julio tells his parents about the relationship, and although his mother, Maria, approves, his father, Luis, dislikes his son dating an African American girl because his first girlfriend was killed by gang members who were African American."}
{"text":"Romiette and Julio struggle with the pressure of their environment's disapprobation, reaching a crisis when the gang threaten them at gunpoint. The two of them meet with Ben and Destiny and concoct a plan to deal with the gang: Romiette and Julio will show their affection in public in order to draw the gang member's attention, while Ben and Destiny will be nearby and armed with a gun, ready to step in and confront them. The plan fails at a critical juncture when the car breaks down, and Romiette and Julio are abducted by the Devil Dogs."}
{"text":"Ben and Destiny go to the Cappelle's home and explain what has happened to Romiette's parents, Lady and Cornell. Lady asks Malaka where the teens are, but Malaka denies knowing where they are. She eventually reveals their location when questioned by the police."}
{"text":"Romiette and Julio turn out to be stranded at the bottom of a boat in London Woods Lake. When lightning strikes, they are separated. Having fallen into the lake, unable to swim, Romiette blacks out and experiences once again her recurring dream. When Julio finds her floating face down, he pulls her to land and finds she is not breathing. As Julio tries to wake her, Romiette recognizes the unknown male voice in her dream as Julio's voice."}
{"text":"In their review, Kirkus Reviews wrote: \"The parallels to Shakespeare\u2019s play are often self-conscious and belabored, drawn at odd moments in the story. Still, a straightforward, uncluttered narrative will hook readers into the well-paced plot and sympathetic characters; loose ends are tied more neatly than a package, prettying up the ending by putting a happily-ever-after spin on the lovers\u2019 fates.\""}
{"text":"Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe"}
{"text":"Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe is a children's novel written by Bette Greene that was awarded a Newbery Honor in 1975. The book was published in 1974 by Puffin Books. It is the first of three novels to feature protagonist Beth Lambert and her friend Philip Hall. The sequels are titled \"Get On Out of Here, Philip Hall\", and \"I've Already Forgotten Your Name, Philip Hall\"."}
{"text":"The book is set in rural Arkansas in the late 20th century. Eleven-year-old Beth Lambert is second-best at almost everything in school, from math to sports. She doesn't mind, though, because she's second only to Philip Hall. Over the course of the novel, she begins to grapple with the idea that perhaps she's letting Philip beat her so he'll remain her friend."}
{"text":"What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day"}
{"text":"What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day is the 1997 debut novel by Pearl Cleage. It was published by Avon on December 1, 1997 and was selected for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club in 1998 and was a New York Times Best Seller for nine straight weeks.\"What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day\" marks Pearl Cleage's first published novel and it is followed by the 2001 novel \"I Wish I Had a Red Dress\". The novel depicts the life of a young African-American woman named Ava Johnson in the following months after being diagnosed with HIV; in addition to the realities of living with a retrovirus, Cleage's work addresses issues involving race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability in American society."}
{"text":"The novel is separated into five parts: June, July, August, September, and November."}
{"text":"In the epilogue, Ava reveals that Imani's casts were removed and she's doing well. Frank and Mattie finally get caught by the police after committing several drug-related robberies. Since the Anderson's left town, the church inducts a new pastor, Sister Judith, who is received well by the community. With Sister Judith officiating, Eddie and Ava get married."}
{"text":"The majority of the plot takes place in Idlewild, Michigan during the 1990s. The novel features social issues that were consistent with the time period and the type of story; these issues include violence, drug abuse, sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy, and an increased lack of access to education."}
{"text":"Concerning Cleage's discussion of gender relations, Barbara Valle has highlighted the portrayal of \"cosmic confusion\" between men and women In the same vein, Loverlie and Erin King interpret the novel as a \"healing romance\" because of its insistence on the idea that the healing of the challenges faced by African-American people require the cooperation of both men and women."}
{"text":"Authors, Erin King and Lovalerie King, praised Cleage's work for depicting a story about HIV\/AIDS in a humorous way."}
{"text":"Timothy Lyle commends Cleage's work for bringing awareness to HIV positive African-American women."}
{"text":"In a feature in \"Voice from the Gaps\" at University of Minnesota, Cleage's work is praised for depicting an alternative representation of motherhood and the struggles that come along with it."}
{"text":"The novel received some critical response by Bryan Aubrey on the basis of Ava's character transitioning from an outspoken, unpredictable character to one who makes predictable decisions based on political and spiritual correctness. Aubrey compares the representation of Ava's newfound happiness in life to the ideology of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour which assert that people's lives will drastically improve once they start performing \"anti-stress\" activities."}
{"text":"The novel has been critically compared to \"Animal Dreams\" (1990) for characterizing a male protagonist as having very little flaws. Aubrey Bryan argues that the portrayal of Eddie Jefferson as a near perfect individual lends the novel to be more instructional rather than realistic with multi-dimensional characters."}
{"text":"Timothy Lyle critiques the novel's reliance on responding to adverse life situations with the response of heteronormative practices, \"gender compliance,\" and \"able-bodied productivity.\" Lyle also argues that Cleage's work reinforces problematic interpretations of blackness which set rigid expectations for what blackness is and what it is not; Lyle argues that Cleage controversially asserts that Ava's character, an HIV positive black woman, must show \"signs of potential rehabilitation\" and maintain a likable personality in order to regain acceptance in the black community."}
{"text":"The novel closely associates rehabilitation with the idea of \"coming-home\" to one's place of origin in order to find love, community, and purpose amidst a threatening life situation."}
{"text":"The novel emphasizes finding happiness in the face of adversity. With Joyce experiencing the loss of a husband, Ava receiving an HIV positive diagnosis, Eartha's tragic loss of both her parents, and Eddie's struggle with violence and PTSD, the novel works to depict characters finding purpose and happiness in the face of adverse life situations."}
{"text":"In order to find happiness in light of these situations, Cleage implies the importance of the use of \"spiritual practices\" in order to reform one's personal issues into acceptance and find peace in the practice of compassion for others."}
{"text":"Cleage's portrayal of Ava's HIV diagnosis as well as its inclusion of sex-education has received some criticism for its inaccurate depiction of the realities of the disease as well as the logistics of preventing its contraction in HIV-discordant relationships, which are relationships where one partner is HIV-positive and one is not"}
{"text":"In an analysis of Cleage's work, Timothy Lyle proposes that Cleage takes part in cultural sanitizing, a practice in which an author problematically molds a taboo subject into a socially acceptable narrative. Lyle attributes the success of the novel to Cleage's depiction of a heterosexual African-American with HIV into a pleasurable narrative in which Ava's \"threatening\" diagnosis is ultimately accepted back into able-bodied heteronormativity. Cleage's depiction of an HIV inflicted African-American is criticized by Lyle as it alludes to the idea that an HIV inflicted individual must \"soap up\" and \"scrub down\" in order to regain acceptance in general society."}
{"text":"Ayana Weekley argues that respectability politics, the phenomenon of dominant figures in marginalized groups aligning their values with the dominant values of the majority, mold the discourse of race, gender, and sexuality in relation to the interrogation of the HIV\/AIDs epidemic in Cleage's work."}
{"text":"Mama Day is the third novel by Gloria Naylor. The story focuses upon the tragic love affair of \"star-crossed\" lovers Ophelia \"Cocoa\" Day and George Andrews. The setting of the novel is split between New York City, where George was born and raised and Ophelia has recently moved, and Willow Springs, a fictional community situated on a coastal island on the border of Georgia and South Carolina where Ophelia's family has lived for several generations. The novel takes place within the same fictional universe as some of Naylor's other novels, indicated through its passing references to events and characters from both \"Linden Hills\" and \"Bailey's Cafe\"."}
{"text":"Sapphira Wade \u2013 Mama Day's great-grandmother, who is known on the Island as the mystical \"great, great, grand mother.\" The legend of her life is murky, but she is known to have been a slave woman who married Bascombe Wade, bore seven sons, and by some mysterious means gained the deed to the island of Willow Springs from her husband before he died in 1823, from which point the island became a community of free African Americans during the pre-Civil War era."}
{"text":"Miranda (Mama) Day \u2013 Mama Day is a witty old lady and the matriarch of Willow Springs. Mama Day is Cocoa's great-aunt and the sister of Abigail. She is a woman who believes in heritage, family, and a deep understanding of the power of nature. Mama Day is often meddling in Cocoa's life and truly wants to see her happy. Mama Day uses magic, nature, wit, and wisdom to help the people of Willow Springs."}
{"text":"Abigail Day \u2013 Cocoa's grandmother and Mama Day's sister. She is respectful, even-tempered and the peace maker of the family. Abigail Day is a doting grandmother who spoils Cocoa."}
{"text":"Ophelia (Cocoa) Day \u2013 The last living Day of her generation. She is headstrong and stubborn. When the novel opens she has been living in New York City since leaving Willow Springs to go to school seven years earlier, but she goes back to visit for two weeks every August. It is in New York that she meets George Andrews."}
{"text":"George Andrews \u2013 Cocoa's husband. George is an orphan who grew up in a shelter and knows nothing about his family or ancestry. Hardened by life he takes everything one day at a time, and carefully calculates all of his decisions and actions. He doesn't rely on anyone but himself to do things for him. He works at an engineering firm, and is fanatical about football because he's drawn to its detailed strategies. He also has a heart condition that he must monitor closely, which contributes to his need to regulate every aspect of his life."}
{"text":"Dr. Buzzard \u2013 The charlatan of Willow Springs. He brews moonshine and creates other \"remedies\" for various problems and ailments which he sells to the people of Willow Springs. Dr. Buzzard thinks that he and Mama Day are rivals, but Mama Day does not believe that they hold similar powers, or even that his powers are real."}
{"text":"Ruby \u2013 Ruby is a family friend who is overweight, insecure, jealous and practices voodoo. She uses her powers to manipulate Junior Lee into marrying her."}
{"text":"Junior Lee \u2013 Married to Ruby. Likes to drink and party, a shiftless individual."}
{"text":"\"Mama Day\" is a novel whose subgenres include legend, folklore, mystery, and fantasy. It contains a multitude of narrative voices that include the following:"}
{"text":"1st person narration \u2013 Cocoa's and George's first person narration, which is displayed as a conversation to one another about events that have occurred, is the other narrative voice. It switches between the two characters without any evidence other than a brief space between the two sections. It is read as if the readers are overhearing the conversation. Because of these different narrative viewpoints the novel is filled with dramatic irony. Readers see this with the reoccurring imagery and symbolism of the \"chicken\", and \"chicken coup\"."}
{"text":"Because of what Rita Mae Brown feels is a lack of \"self-restraint\" in Mama Day, keeping up with the plot of the novel and who is speaking, the reader is suggested to \"press on doggedly\u2026.[So they can realize] that a plot is developing through these fragmented viewpoints.\""}
{"text":"Mama Day includes allusions to classical Shakespeare plays such as \"King Lear\" which is referred to many times by both Cocoa and George; \"Hamlet\", which houses a female character by the name of Ophelia; and \"The Tempest\", which includes a female character with the same name as Mama Day \u2013 Miranda. Like Miranda from the Shakespeare play, Mama Day also deals with magic or supernatural powers and is set on a secluded island. Bharati Mukherjee states that the storyline in \"Mama Day\", like Shakespeare's play \"Romeo and Juliet\", \"concerns star-crossed lovers.\""}
{"text":"Liliane: Resurrection of The Daughter is a novel by Ntozake Shange. It was originally published by St. Martin's Press in 1994. The novel tells the coming-of-age story of a young Black woman, Liliane Parnell, through the numerous voices of childhood friends, family, lovers, acquaintances, conversations between Liliane and her psychoanalyst, and Liliane herself. Liliane is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent African-American judge, Lincoln Parnell, and his beautiful wife Sunday Bliss Parnell who is working towards reconciling her life as an artist in the present with both the secrets and the expectations of class ascendance from her family's past."}
{"text":"The novel opens with a conversation between Liliane and her psychoanalyst. These conversations become regular interval points within and throughout the novel as the story unfolds. Liliane expresses concern about her current situation, professing that she cannot breath and that she is looking for somebody and it does not matter who, she says, \"as long as he won't hurt me\"."}
{"text":"As the novel continues, Liliane's character is developed through the lens of those around her with whom she is close. The reader learns that Liliane grew up within a wealthy and prominent Black family that was part of the Talented tenth. Liliane's father pushes her to pursue a husband who will \"'...have the backbone to fight for what's never happened, or for dreams.'\" These comments lead Liliane to eventually leave her first boyfriend, Danny, and pursue another man, named Granville, who better conforms to her father's ideal of a suitable match."}
{"text":"The novel's form is seemingly unique as it is divided into chapters narrated by important persons in Liliane's life and conversations between Liliane and her psychoanalyst that occur in between each chapter. These chapters feature anecdotes about the narrating character's interactions with Liliane, usually providing illumination of the conversations Liliane has with her psychoanalyst that are featured prior to the chapter. Because of the multiplicity of narrators throughout the novel, the reader is often forced to make a decision about which narrator to believe. This unique episodic structure allows for the novel to cover a wide range in time periods."}
{"text":"A central theme in the novel concerns the project of Racial Uplift within the African-American and Black community. Liliane's social standing within an upper middle class prominent Black family seemingly conforms to the model of racial uplift promoted by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who advocated for the instruction of Liberal Arts education to Black people in the United States in order to create a leadership elite often referred to as the Talented Tenth. Liliane's father, a prominent Black judge, is highly invested in maintaining the image of his family as a part of that leadership elite. However, Liliane's contact and social relations with Black individuals who are outside of her own class seemingly problematizes this philosophical project to a certain extent."}
{"text":"The exploration of Female Sexuality is featured heavily in the novel. Despite her father's attempts to instill Liliane with a sense of obligation to the project of Racial Uplift, and his encouragement of Liliane to become the wife of someone who has the potential to be a powerful leader in the Black community, Liliane's romantic and sexual relationships are varied, diverse, and bridge interpersonal gaps of both class and race throughout the novel. The novel portrays Liliane as a decisive agent in the context of her sexual relationships."}
{"text":"Liliane is very much emotionally conflicted as a result of her family's past secrets, her desires for herself, and her father's desires for her. Like her mother, Liliane struggles with choosing between honoring herself and the project of Racial Uplift that her father is heavily invested in. Additionally, Liliane is heavily affected by the existential pain of anti-black racism. As a result, Liliane's conversations with her psychoanalyst are often turbulent and disjointed as she struggles to build her sense of self in her transition to adulthood and her growth as a painter."}
{"text":"Elijah of Buxton is a children's novel written by Christopher Paul Curtis and published in 2007. The book won critical praise and was a Newbery Honor book and the winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. It also was a children's book bestseller"}
{"text":"\"Elijah of Buxton\" is about an eleven-year-old boy, Elijah Freeman, who lives in Buxton, Canada. It was started as the Elgin Settlement, a refugee camp for African-American slaves who escaped via the Underground Railroad to gain freedom in Canada. Elijah is the first free-born child in the settlement, and has never lived under slavery. He has only heard of it. He goes into the United States to help stop a man from his settlement from stealing money from his friend, and learns there that it is a privilege to be free."}
{"text":"\"Elijah of Buxton\" has been well received. \"School Library Journal\" called it \"an example of everything Curtis does well. His historical research is superior. His characters heartwarming. His prose funny and heart-wrenching in turns.\" and \"A great book and well deserving of any buzz it happens to achieve.\" \"Kirkus Reviews\" gave a starred review, declaring \"This is Curtis\u2019s best novel yet, and no doubt many readers, young and old, will finish and say, \"This is one of the best books I have ever read.\"\""}
{"text":"\"Publishers Weekly\" wrote, \"The arresting historical setting and physical comedy signal classic Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy), but while Elijah's boyish voice represents the Newbery Medalist at his finest, the story unspools at so leisurely a pace that kids might easily lose interest.\" and \"The powerful ending is violent and unsettling, yet also manages to be uplifting.\" Common Sense Media awarded it five stars, calling it a \"humorous, powerful, masterful escape-slave tale\" and asserted \"This wonderful, moving novel is sure to become a staple of discussion groups in schools and libraries across the country.\""}
{"text":"It has won a number of awards including a 2008 Newbery Honor, the 2008 Coretta Scott King Award, the 2008 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and the 2008 Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award"}
{"text":"Oscar Micheaux's The Forged Note: A Romance Of The Darker Races is a 528-page novel published in 1915. It was republished in 2008 by Kessinger Publishing, LLC. The story pertains to a racially motivated lynching in Atlanta."}
{"text":"Blackout is a young adult novel written by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon. The book follows six interlinked stories about Black teen love during a power outage in New York City. The book is set to be released on June 22, 2021."}
{"text":"Dhonielle Clayton is credited with the initial idea for the book. The authors expressed their desire to write a book about Black love and joy rather than about police brutality. The book was announced via Twitter in November 2020. Clayton described the novel as \"our love letter to love, to New York City, and to Black teens. Our reminder to them that their stories, their joy, their love are valid and worthy of being spotlighted.\" Thomas also described the novel as a love letter to Black teens."}
{"text":"The North American rights to the book were secured by HarperCollins after a twelve-way auction. The novel was also acquired by Egmont in the U.K. for six figures."}
{"text":"\"Blackout\" follows thirteen teenagers in six interlinked stories which celebrate Black love. After a summer heatwave causes a citywide power outage in New York City, Black teens explore love, friendships, and hidden truths over the course of a single day. Among the characters are exes who have to bury their rivalry to walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn for a block party, two boys who get trapped on the subway, and best friends who get stuck in the library."}
{"text":"Middle Passage (1990) is a historical novel by American writer Charles R. Johnson about the final voyage of an illegal American slave ship on the Middle Passage. Set in 1830, it presents a personal and historical perspective of the illegal slave trade in the United States, telling the story of Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave who unknowingly boards a slave ship bound for Africa in order to escape a forced marriage. The novel received critical acclaim, winning the 1990 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction."}
{"text":"Johnson, Charles R. Middle Passage. New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998."}
{"text":"The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by both white and black Americans."}
{"text":"The book was published to acclaim, which praised its story and Jones's prose. In particular, his ability to intertwine stories within stories received great praise from \"The New York Times\"."}
{"text":"The narration of \"The Known World\" is from the perspective of an omniscient figure who does not voice judgment. This allows the reader to experience the story without bias."}
{"text":"The novel won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004. In 2005 it won the International Dublin Literary Award, one of the richest literary awards for a novel in the English language. It was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award."}
{"text":"In 2009, website \"The Millions\" polled 48 critics, writers, and editors; the panel voted \"The Known World\" the second best novel since 2000."}
{"text":"The Women of Brewster Place (1982) is the debut novel of American author Gloria Naylor. It won the National Book Award in category First Novel."}
{"text":"It was adapted as the 1989 miniseries \"The Women of Brewster Place\" and the 1990 television show \"Brewster Place\" by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions."}
{"text":"\"The Women\" explores the lives of both men and women in an urban setting and examines relationships, both in terms of friendship and romantic love, including homosexual relationships."}
{"text":"In each of the \"Seven Stories\" of its subtitle, one or more of the seven women are involved with the main character of that particular story, such as Mattie appearing in Etta Mae's story or Kiswana showing up in Cora Lee's."}
{"text":"The women of Brewster Place are \"hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased\". Their names are Mattie Michael, Etta Mae Johnson, Lucielia \"Ciel\" Turner, Melanie \"Kiswana\" Browne, Cora Lee, Lorraine, and Theresa. Each of their lives are explored in several short stories. These short stories also chronicle the ups and downs many Black women face."}
{"text":"A new musical adaptation of \"The Women of Brewster Place\" was commissioned for the stage. The musical premiered at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, GA on September 12, 2007, the same theatre that also co-produced the show itself. It was directed by Molly Smith. \"The Women of Brewster Place\" toured several cities, opening to several positive reviews."}
{"text":"Dark Princess, written by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1928, is one of his five historical novels. One of Du Bois's favorite works, the novel explores the beauty of people of color around the world. This was part of Du Bois' use of fiction to explore his times in a way not possible in non-fiction history. He expressed fully imagined lives of his characters, using them to explore the richness and beauty of black culture. The novel was not well received when published. It was criticized for its expression of eroticism as well as for what some critics thought was a failed attempt at social realism."}
{"text":"The book is divided into four large chapters: \"The Exile,\" \"The Pullman Porter,\" \"The Chicago Politician,\" and \"The Maharaja of Bwodphur\". The sections deal with different stages in the protagonist's life, moving from his self-imposed exile in Germany late in life, to his early employment as a porter on the railroads, based in New York, then to his career as a politician in Chicago, and his return to Virginia, the land of his birth. While the sections trace the protagonist's growth as a revolutionary figure, they are not directly connected."}
{"text":"The plot follows a character named Matthew Townes, a college student in his junior year at the University of Manhattan studying to be an obstetrician. Early in the novel, Townes is told that not only is he barred from pursuing his career aspirations, he is not allowed to finish his academic studies. His status as an African American disqualifies him in the early 20th century from completing required courses at a white obstetrics hospital, where he would be caring for white female patients."}
{"text":"Townes is devastated and goes to Germany in a kind of exile. There he meets Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, daughter of a maharajah. She reassures Towns of the importance of the history of people of color in the world, and of their presence and impact of their beauty worldwide. The Princess takes him from his dreary American world with its strict binary divide by race. She introduces him to a vibrant world of prominent world leaders of color, while acknowledging some with negative influence on the progress of blacks in the United States. Du Bois is believed to be referring to the leader Marcus Garvey in his character Perigua."}
{"text":"The relationship between Townes and the princess develops; she bears his child, who by birthright is the Maharajah of Bwodpur. Townes had not thought it possible that an African American man might have such a connection to royalty."}
{"text":"Du Bois explores internationalism and international racial solidarity, as well as corruption and violent radicalism within African-American culture."}
{"text":"\"Dark Princess\"\u2019s subtitle, \"A Romance\", points to the narrative\u2019s double valence. As Mich\u00e8le Mendelssohn argues, \"it is the story of a love affair, as well as the story of an ideological romance that challenges one of the United States\u2019 most cherished ideas about itself, the notion that it is a land of progress and possibility for all. The love lost between the hero and the U. S. is the spur for the novel\u2019s political reorientation.\""}
{"text":"Some critics believe that the book was inspired by the 1911 First Universal Races Congress in London, which Du Bois had attended. In developing the character of Kautilya, Du Bois has been discussed as possibly drawing inspiration from a few historical figures. Scholars have speculated that these may include an unnamed Indian princess at the Universal Races Congress, the Indian independence activist Bhikaji Cama, and the Pan-African Congress organizer Ida Gibbs Hunt, wife of diplomat William Henry Hunt."}
{"text":"Late in life, Du Bois described this as his favorite work."}
{"text":"One Crazy Summer is a historical fiction novel by American author Rita Williams-Garcia, published by Amistad in 2010. The novel is about Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, three sisters, visiting their mother in Oakland, California, during the summer of 1968."}
{"text":"In the year of its inception, the book was a National Book Award finalist for young people's literature. In 2011 it won the Coretta Scott King Award for its author, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and was a Newbery Medal Honor Book."}
{"text":"During the day, the three sisters go to The People's Center run by the Black Panther Party for breakfast and day camp, where they meet Sister Mukumbu. Here the three sisters get taught about the movement, which she explains what the movement does like feeding the poor, helping poor African Americans, and protecting African American communities. The Black Panther member Bobby Hutton has been shot and killed by police, and one of their founding members, Huey Newton, has been wrongfully jailed. The children at the center will soon participate in a rally to protest these injustices."}
{"text":"After a day trip to San Francisco, the sisters return home to find their mother Cecile and two members of the Black Panther Party being arrested. Cecile tells the police she has no children, for she doesn't want the girls to be involved, so the girls pretend to live next door. Soon a friend from the Center, Hirohito, comes for the girls and allows them to stay with him and his mother until Cecile returns home."}
{"text":"The time of the rally arrives. During the talent show portion, the girls perform a poem their mother wrote, which they found while cleaning the kitchen after her arrest. After their recital, Fern takes the microphone and tells the Black Panthers how she saw one of their most vocal members, (Crazy) Kelvin, interacting agreeably with the police, which gets him in trouble with the party members."}
{"text":"At the rally, the sisters see their mother has been released from jail, and return home with her. Though Delphine and Cecile's relationship remains strained, Cecile tells Delphine how she lost her mother at the age of eleven and had a rough life thereafter. She tries to explain why she left her children, but Delphine is still too young to understand. The next day, the girls return home, after finally hugging their mother."}
{"text":"There is a multitude of themes to be found in this book. 1968 is a radical time for black history, and the portrayal of the Black Panther ideals helps to prompt discussions of Civil Rights, injustice, black pride, and racial prejudice."}
{"text":"The power of names is another strong idea in the book. Cecile changes her name to Nzila, a Yoruba name meaning \"the path.\" It is also suggested that Cecile left her children because she could not name Fern \"Afua.\" Delphine ponders why her mother would want to change her name since names are how we identify ourselves."}
{"text":"The theme of women's liberation and advancement in society is also presented in this book. After one of the younger sisters gets a stomach ache, Delphine goes to the store with their Chinese food allowance and cooks real food in the previously forbidden kitchen. This causes an exchange between Delphine and Cecile in which Cecile accuses Delphine of trying to \"tie herself to the yoke\" and tells her she should not be so quick to \"pull the plow.\""}
{"text":"Other themes include family, forgiveness, and growth."}
{"text":"\"One Crazy Summer\" is the first book in the Gaither Sisters Series. The second book, \"P.S. Be Eleven\" was published in 2013, and features the girls returning to their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The third book, \"Gone Crazy in Alabama\" was published in 2015 and features the sisters visiting their relatives in Autauga County, Alabama. The two sequels were also winners of the Coretta Scott King Award."}
{"text":"This book is recommended for ages 9\u201312. It has a Lexile of 750L."}
{"text":"According to the critics, \"One Crazy Summer\" is a powerful and humorous story that is highly recommended. Teri Markson, writing for \"School Library Journal\",states that it is \"emotionally challenging and beautifully written\" for children about ethnic identity and personal responsibility. Tricia Melgaard from \"School Library Journal\" states that this story is delightful and told through the eyes of Delphine, a \"sensitive and intuitive\" young girl. C. J. Morales, writing for the \"New York Amsterdam News\", states that it is written to teach black history in a meaningful and amusing way, and \"it will keep you laughing out loud.\""}
{"text":"Shifting between multiple perspectives, The Street uses extensive flashbacks to reveal its plot. Lutie Johnson has an eight-year-old son, Bub, to support. Separated but not legally divorced from Bub's father, Jim, Lutie feels that Jim's inability to find employment, her decision to work as a domestic for a wealthy white family in Connecticut, and Jim's subsequent infidelity ruined her marriage."}
{"text":"Lutie moves into a small apartment on 116th Street in Harlem. Taking an immediate dislike to the super, Jones, she decides to take the apartment, agreeing to pay about thirty dollars a month in rent."}
{"text":"Jones becomes sexually obsessed with Lutie; recalling his youth in the Navy, Jones remembers his feelings of loneliness and sexual frustration while aboard ship, a condition that worsened as he began working and living in basement apartments and boiler rooms. Jones resents his live-in girlfriend, Min, due to her lack of physical attractiveness, venting his aggressions on her. Jones befriends Bub in hopes of getting Lutie to pay attention to him. Sensing Jones' intentions, Mrs. Hedges, the madame of a brothel, tells Jones not to bother as a wealthy white man has already taken an interest in her."}
{"text":"Min, meanwhile, increasingly fearful of Jones, seeks out a practitioner of hoodoo. After getting a referral from Mrs. Hedges, Min finds David The Prophet. Surprised and comforted by how closely David listens to her, Min pays for a cross, some powder, some drops for Jones' morning coffee, and some candles to burn at night. Feeling reassured, Min hangs the cross over the bed as David suggested. When Min defiantly refuses to tell Jones where she had been, he advances on her angrily until he sees the cross over the bed. Feeling a superstitious dread, Jones retreats."}
{"text":"One night, Lutie has drinks at Junto's. After entertaining the crowd with a song, Lutie makes the acquaintance of Boots Smith, a bandleader and an employee of Junto's. Insincerely promising to help her establish a singing career, Boots convinces Lutie to take a ride with him. Lutie, who has already decided not to sleep with Boots, agrees to sing with his band. After returning home, she discovers that Bub has let Jones into the apartment while she was out and that Jones had rifled through her things."}
{"text":"Sometime after Lutie begins singing, Jones attacks her in the hallway, attempting to drag her into the basement. Lutie screams for help and Mrs. Hedges comes to her rescue. After inviting her inside for tea, Mrs. Hedges tells her of Junto's interest in her. Junto also tells Boots the same thing, making him promise not to pursue a romance with Lutie. Boots, indebted to Junto for helping him evade the draft, reluctantly agrees. He also agrees not to pay Lutie for her singing and to arrange a meeting between Lutie and Junto."}
{"text":"After Mrs. Hedges tells him yet again that he can't have Lutie, Jones angrily decides to get even with her. He convinces Bub to steal mail, paying Bub a few dollars. Bub, who initially refused Jones' offer, is eager to work; after hearing Lutie (who has just realized that she won't be paid for her singing) loudly cursing their poverty, Bub decides to help out by getting a job. Jones also implicates Min in the scheme by tricking her into getting copies of the mailbox keys made for him."}
{"text":"Bub is caught stealing the mail and sent to the Children's Shelter until he can be seen in Children's Court. Desperate to get Bub out of custody, Lutie consults a lawyer. Not knowing that she doesn't need a lawyer for the upcoming hearing, she agrees to pay two hundred dollars for the man's services."}
{"text":"Despairing of coming up with the money on her own, Lutie decides to ask Boots for help. Boots promises to get the money for her the next night. The next day, Lutie visits Bub at the Children's Shelter but is unable to ask him about the letters. That night, Mrs. Hedges once again reminds her that Junto is interested in her. Feeling apprehensive, Lutie makes her appointment with Boots. Junto is there. Realizing Boots, Mrs. Hedges, and Junto have been working in concert, she yells at Boots to get Junto out of the apartment. After conferring with Boots, Junto leaves, warning Boots once again not to make any romantic overtures to Lutie. It is then that Boots decides to take Lutie for himself whether Junto approves or not."}
{"text":"After a half-hearted attempt to convince Lutie to become Junto's mistress, Boots makes a sexual advance on her, kissing her and grabbing her breast. He slaps her twice when she pulls away. Lutie grabs a heavy candlestick and beats Boots to death with it. Lutie steals Boots' wallet, deciding to use the money inside to pay the lawyer's fees. Realizing that she would be caught, however, Lutie puts half the money back and flees the apartment. Knowing that she will never be able to rescue her son, Lutie buys a one-way ticket to Chicago and boards a train."}
{"text":"Parable of the Talents is a science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 1998. It is the second in a series of two, a sequel to \"Parable of the Sower\"."}
{"text":"It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel."}
{"text":"\"Parable of the Talents\" is told from the points of view of Lauren Oya Olamina and her daughter Larkin Olamina\/Asha Vere. The novel consists of journal entries by Lauren and passages by Asha Vere. Five years after the events of the previous novel \"Parable of the Sower\", Lauren has founded a new religious community called Acorn, which is centered around her religion Earthseed, which is predicated around the belief that humanity's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets in order for humanity to reach adulthood."}
{"text":"The novel is set against the backdrop of a dystopian United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called \"Christian America\" led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan \"Make America Great Again\", Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. Slavery has resurfaced with \"shock collars\" being used to control slaves. Virtual reality headsets known as \"Dreamasks\" are also popular since they enable wearers to escape their harsh reality."}
{"text":"During the course of the novel, Acorn is attacked and taken over by Christian American \"Crusaders\" and turned into a re-education camp. For the next year and a half, Lauren and the other adults are enslaved and forced to wear \"shock collars\". Their Christian American captors exploit them as forced labor under the pretext of \"reforming\" them. Lauren and several of the women are also regularly raped by their captors, who regard them as \"heathen\". In 2035, Lauren and her followers eventually rebel and kill their captors. To avoid retribution, they are forced to disperse into hiding. By 2036, President Jarret is defeated after a single term due to public dissatisfaction with the \"Alaska\u2013Canada War\" and revelations of his role in witch burnings."}
{"text":"Meanwhile, Larkin is adopted by an African American Christian America family and renamed \"Asha Vere Alexander\" after a popular Dreamask hero. Unloved and abused by her adoptive parents, Asha grows up never knowing who her biological parents are. As an adult, Asha reunites with her uncle Marcus \"Marc\" Duran, who was believed to have perished in the events of the previous novel and has since become a Christian America minister. With Uncle Marc's help, Larkin becomes an academic historian but leaves the Christian faith."}
{"text":"Unknown to Asha, Uncle Marc had previously re-established contact with his long-lost half-sister Lauren. Marc claimed that the \"Crusaders\" were rogue elements who do not represent Christian America. He tells Asha that her mother is dead, and never told Lauren he had found her daughter. With Jarret's legacy in disgrace, Lauren's Earthseed religion grows in popularity in a post-war United States, funding scholarships for needy university students and encouraging humanity to leave Earth and settle in Alpha Centauri."}
{"text":"After Asha learns that Lauren is her biological mother, she manages to meet with her mother. Though Asha is unable to forgive her mother for choosing Earthseed over her, Lauren tells her daughter that her door is always open to her. After learning that her half-brother Uncle Marc hid the fact that Asha was related to Lauren, Lauren severs all ties with her estranged brother. Lauren dies at the age of 81 while watching the first shuttles leaving Earth for the starship \"Christopher Columbus\", which carries settlers in suspended animation to Alpha Centauri."}
{"text":"Jana Diemer Llewellyn regards \"Parable of the Talents\" as a harsh indictment of religious fundamentalism and compares the novel to Joanna Russ' \"The Female Man\" and Margaret Atwood's \"The Handmaid's Tale\". The \"Los Angeles Times\" op-ed editor Abby Aguirre has likened the religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism of President Jarret to the \"Make America Great Again\" rhetoric of the Trump Administration."}
{"text":"Butler had planned to write a third \"Parable\" novel, tentatively titled \"Parable of the Trickster\", which would have focused on the community's struggle to survive on a new planet. She began this novel after finishing \"Parable of the Talents\", and mentioned her work on it in a number of interviews, but at some point encountered a writer's block. She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in \"Fledgling\", her final novel. The various false starts for the novel can now be found among Butler's papers at the Huntington Library, as described in an article at the \"Los Angeles Review of Books\"."}
{"text":"Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison, published by Random House in 1952. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity."}
{"text":"\"Invisible Man\" won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African American writer to win the award."}
{"text":"In 1998, the Modern Library ranked \"Invisible Man\" 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. \"Time\" magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005, calling it \"the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century,\" rather than a \"race novel, or even a bildungsroman.\" Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize an existential vision with a \"Kafka-like absurdity.\" According to \"The New York Times\", Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir \"Dreams from My Father\" on Ellison's novel."}
{"text":"Ellison says in his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition that he started to write what would eventually become \"Invisible Man\" in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont, in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine. The book took five years to complete with one year off for what Ellison termed an \"ill-conceived short novel.\" \"Invisible Man\" was published as a whole in 1952. Ellison had published a section of the book in 1947, the famous \"Battle Royal\" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of \"Horizon\" magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters."}
{"text":"Ellison's \"ancestors\" included, among others, \"The Waste Land\" by T.S. Eliot. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ellison states that what he had learned from the poem was imagery, and also improvisation techniques he had only before seen in jazz."}
{"text":"Some other influences include William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Ellison once called Faulkner the South's greatest artist. Likewise, in the Spring 1955 \"Paris Review\", Ellison said of Hemingway: \"I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he\u2019s been there.\""}
{"text":"Some of Ellison's influences had a more direct impact on his novel as when Ellison divulges this, in his introduction to the 30th anniversary of \"Invisible Man\", that the \"character\" (\"in the dual sense of the word\") who had announced himself on his page he \"associated, ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground\". Although, despite the \"distantly\" remark, it appears that Ellison used that novella more than just on that occasion. The beginning of \"Invisible Man\", for example, seems to be structured very similar to \"Notes from Underground\": \"I am a sick man\" compared to \"I am an invisible man\"."}
{"text":"Other most likely influences to Ellison, by way of how much he speaks about them, are: Kenneth Burke, Andre Malraux, Mark Twain, to name a few."}
{"text":"The letters he wrote to fellow novelist Richard Wright as he started working on the novel provide evidence for his disillusion with and defection from the Communist Party for perceived revisionism. In a letter to Wright on August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger toward party leaders for betraying African-American and Marxist class politics during the war years: \"If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well-chosen, well-written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell.\""}
{"text":"The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years."}
{"text":"The narrator lives in a small Southern town and, upon graduating from high school, wins a scholarship to an all-black college. However, to receive it, he must first take part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal for the entertainment of the town's rich white dignitaries."}
{"text":"One afternoon during his junior year at the college, the narrator chauffeurs Mr. Norton, a visiting rich white trustee, out among the old slave-quarters beyond the campus. By chance, he stops at the cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep. Trueblood's account horrifies Mr. Norton so badly that he asks the narrator to find him a drink. The narrator drives him to a bar filled with prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital. The mental patients rail against both of them and eventually overwhelm the orderly assigned to keep the patients under control, injuring Mr. Norton in the process. The narrator hurries Mr. Norton away from the chaotic scene and back to campus."}
{"text":"Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, excoriates the narrator for showing Mr. Norton the underside of black life beyond the campus and expels him. However, Bledsoe gives several sealed letters of recommendation to the narrator, to be delivered to friends of the college in order to assist him in finding a job so that he may eventually re-enroll. The narrator travels to New York and distributes his letters, with no success; the son of one recipient shows him the letter, which reveals Bledsoe's intent to never admit the narrator as a student again."}
{"text":"Acting on the son's suggestion, the narrator seeks work at the Liberty Paint factory, renowned for its pure white paint. He is assigned first to the shipping department, then to the boiler room, whose chief attendant, Lucius Brockway, is highly paranoid and suspects that the narrator is trying to take his job. This distrust worsens after the narrator stumbles into a union meeting, and Brockway attacks the narrator and tricks him into setting off an explosion in the boiler room. The narrator is hospitalized and subjected to shock treatment, overhearing the doctors' discussion of him as a possible mental patient."}
{"text":"The rallies go smoothly at first, with the narrator receiving extensive indoctrination on the Brotherhood's ideology and methods. Soon, though, he encounters trouble from Ras the Exhorter, a fanatical black nationalist who believes that the Brotherhood is controlled by whites. Neither the narrator nor Tod Clifton, a youth leader within the Brotherhood, is particularly swayed by his words. The narrator is later called before a meeting of the Brotherhood and accused of putting his own ambitions ahead of the group. He is reassigned to another part of the city to address issues concerning women, seduced by the wife of a Brotherhood member, and eventually called back to Harlem when Clifton is reported missing and the Brotherhood's membership and influence begin to falter."}
{"text":"The narrator can find no trace of Clifton at first, but soon discovers him selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street, having become disillusioned with the Brotherhood. Clifton is shot and killed by a policeman while resisting arrest; at his funeral, the narrator delivers a rousing speech that rallies the crowd to support the Brotherhood again. At an emergency meeting, Jack and the other Brotherhood leaders criticize the narrator for his unscientific arguments and the narrator determines that the group has no real interest in the black community's problems."}
{"text":"The epilogue returns to the present, with the narrator stating that he is ready to return to the world because he has spent enough time hiding from it. He explains that he has told his story in order to help people see past his own invisibility, and also to provide a voice for people with a similar plight: \"Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?\""}
{"text":"Critic Orville Prescott of \"The New York Times\" called the novel \"the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read,\" and felt it marked \"the appearance of a richly talented writer.\" Novelist Saul Bellow in his review found it \"a book of the very first order, a superb book...it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence.\" George Mayberry of \"The New Republic\" said Ellison \"is a master at catching the shape, flavor and sound of the common vagaries of human character and experience.\""}
{"text":"In \"The Paris Review\", literary critic Harold Bloom referred to \"Invisible Man\", along with Zora Neale Hurston's \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\", as \"the only full scale works of fiction I have read by American blacks in this century that have survival possibilities at all.\""}
{"text":"Anthony Burgess described the novel as \"a masterpiece\"."}
{"text":"It was reported in October 2017 that streaming service Hulu was developing the novel into a television series."}
{"text":"Quicksand is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1928. This is her first novel and she completed the first draft quickly. The novel was out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s. \"Quicksand\" is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. Larsen dedicated the novel to her husband."}
{"text":"Discussing the novel, Jacquelyn Y. McLendon called it the more \"obviously autobiographical\" of Larsen's two novels. Larsen called the emotional experiences of the novel \"the awful truth\" in a letter to her friend Carl van Vechten."}
{"text":"Throughout the development of the novel, though driven by the search for racial identity, Helga also rejects intimate relationships with every man she encounters at each destination. It isn\u2019t until she fully indulges in an intimate relationship that she becomes forced to exist in a space (Deep South) and becomes stuck."}
{"text":"The story\u2019s protagonist. Helga\u2019s mother was born in Denmark and her father was of west-Indian descent. Helga is a young, biracial woman whose journey\u2019s purpose is finding a place where she belongs. She struggles with insecurities. The story begins where she is a teacher at Naxos, a white-imposing school, where she then quits her job that prompts her to spend her time travelling for other jobs and visiting relatives. The story closes with the knowledge that Helga marries a man from the deep south where she ends up being a serial-mother."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s fianc\u00e9 when she is at Naxos. She ends their relationship when she moves away. James comes off as a serious and boring young man."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s employer that enables Helga to move to Harlem after she leaves Naxos. The protagonist is hired to help Mrs. Hayes-Rore write a speech."}
{"text":"A 35 year old handsome man with grey eyes. He is known as the principal of Naxos at the beginning of the story, but then becomes someone that Helga thinks of romantically."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s friend that ultimately influences her to the Harlem Culture. Is a socialite and widow that is utterly obsessed with the race problem brought up in the novel."}
{"text":"When Helga returns to New York again in the story, she meets this southern reverend after bumping into him at church. The two then get married and move to Alabama where they have 5 children."}
{"text":"Danish artist that proposes to Helga and ultimately gets turned down because he objectifies her."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s white aunt in Copenhagen, her mother\u2019s sister."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s white uncle that lives in Copenhagen. His only wish is for Helga to be happy and get married."}
{"text":"Helga struggles with race are emphasized due to society\u2019s attitude toward her. Helga\u2019s mental and physical expedition is to find a place where she doesn\u2019t draw attention to., or take away from her differences. However, society and social order play a role in which people are viewed, if they are culturally different. Helga\u2019s racial identity has been constructed by others inability to accept her own differences."}
{"text":"Helga is a young biracial woman; a half white, half black woman. For Helga, identifying as a biracial woman means she has less restrictions when it comes to racial labels. Her struggles with her identity come from the reluctance of others and how they view themselves and others. Helga\u2019s understanding of herself is constructed through cultural artifacts created by others. Helga follows a biracial identity by refusing to follow a strict racial lifestyle but she still acknowledges her black culture."}
{"text":"Helga\u2019s future is determined by her sex and her race. Her fascination with clothing and color is a way for Helga to build a female identity for herself. Helga dressed in styles unique to herself and others as a way to stand out from the rest. The way she dressed also goes against the way Naxos wanted their teachers to look. She was meant to stand out."}
{"text":"Hogg is a novel by Samuel R. Delany. It was written in San Francisco in 1969 and completed just days before the Stonewall Riots in New York City. A further draft was completed in 1973 in London. At the time it was written, no one would publish it due to its graphic descriptions of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape. \"Hogg\" was finally published \u2013 with some further, though relatively minor, rewrites \u2013 in 1995 by Black Ice Books. The two successive editions have featured some correction, the last of which, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2004, carries a note at the end stating that it is definitive."}
{"text":"The preface to the novel is titled \"The Scorpion Garden\". It is not included in the hardback edition from 1995, although it was written in 1973. It is included in \"The Straits of Messina\" (1989)."}
{"text":"As described in the book \"Inventory\" by The A.V. Club,"}
{"text":"These acts include a substantial amount of \"rape, violence, and murder\", such as \"scenes of Hogg and his gang brutally raping various women\" and other \"extensive scenes involving consumption of bodily waste.\" Every chapter in the novel contains graphic sexual or violent acts."}
{"text":"The main events of the novel take place on June 26, 27, and 28, 1969, in an unspecified city. The narrator mentions various nearby areas\u2014\"Crawhole,\" \"Frontwater,\" and \"Ellenville\"\u2014apparently fictional neighborhoods. The nameless city is described as an industrial wasteland. The events take place at docks, garbage barges, truck-stops, bars, as well as within Hogg's truck. Many of the characters are described as workmen or wear work clothes."}
{"text":"In an interview with TK Enright, Delany states \"\"[Hogg's]\" action takes place in Pornotopia\u2014that is the land where any situation can become rampantly sexual under the least increase in the pressure of attention. Like its sister lands, Comedia and Tragedia, it can only be but so realistic.\" In the same interview Delany also states, \"\"Hogg\" is another of my stories that takes place in the city of Enoch.\" Delany's \"Nevery\u00f3na\" takes place, in part, in Enoch."}
{"text":"At the start, the narrator is living with a Hispanic boy named Pedro and performing sex acts with older men in the basement of the dwelling for money, along with Pedro's teenage sister Maria. He engages in sex with Maria, Pedro, a gang of bikers, and a group of Black men. The narrator consistently assumes the bottom role in these sex acts. One out of the group of Black men chooses the narrator specifically, remarking that he appears of possible part-Black ancestry."}
{"text":"When their last job is completed, the group retires to the Piewacket bar, where they fraternize with members of the Phantoms\u2014the same biker gang encountered in the beginning of the novel. Nigg and one of the bikers, Hawk, hatch a scheme to sell the narrator to a black tugboat captain called Big Sambo. Without consulting Hogg, all three ride away on Hawk's motorcycle to meet Big Sambo at the docks in Crawhole. Big Sambo talks down the price and pays Nigg and Hawk fifteen dollars for the narrator. Big Sambo is a large, physically-powerful tugboat operator who keeps his twelve-year-old daughter, Honey-Pie, around as a sex object for his own pleasure."}
{"text":"The narrator goes walking around the docks at night, where he overhears a radio on the deck of a garbage scow. The newscaster on the radio reports on a series of murders that has occurred recently\u2014as it turns out, the suspect is Denny. This is confirmed to the reader when it is noted that the phrase \"it's all right\" is written in blood at the crime scenes. The Piewacket bar, where the gang had previously hung out, was attacked by Denny with gunfire. Several people including the bartender and some bikers were killed."}
{"text":"On the docks the narrator then meets two garbagemen: Red, a red-headed white man, and Rufus, a black man. While having sex with the narrator outside, they plan to \"borrow\" the narrator from Big Sambo and keep him at their scow on a collar and leash. They are interrupted by Whitey, a cop who patrols the area, who also has sex with the narrator. Whitey is called down to the waterfront to help investigate the murders of Mona, Harry and their year-old baby. Rufus, Red and the narrator return to the waterfront where a radio crew has recently arrived and reports live from the scene. Big Sambo sees the narrator by the docks and tells him to return to his scow."}
{"text":"Hogg arrives at Big Sambo's scow and assaults Big Sambo. Hogg and the narrator leave the docks in Hogg's truck, in which Denny was hiding from the police. After driving out of the Crawhole area and getting clear of the law, Hogg commands Denny to bathe himself, dress in clean clothes, and hitch a ride to Florida. While driving back from the truck stop Hogg declares his intentions to spend the next few months with the narrator and expresses his happiness that they are reunited. However, the narrator is formulating a plan to leave Hogg at the next opportune moment. Hogg finally asks him \"What's the matter?\" to which he responds, \"Nothin,\"\u2014his only line of dialog in the novel."}
{"text":"The off-stage murder spree by Dennis \"Denny\" Harkner is described by radio reporter Edward Sawyer as \"an afternoon and evening long rampage...that threatens to outdo Starkweather, Speck, and Manson together.\" Later in the novel it is revealed that the spree took place on June 27th, 1969, more than a month before the Tate murders were perpetrated by the Manson Family on August 8th, 1969."}
{"text":"Michael Hemmingson wrote in the journal \"The Review of Contemporary Fiction\" that Hogg,"}
{"text":"Despite the book's infamous reputation, several respected authors have given it their endorsement. Norman Mailer, for instance, said \"There is no question that \"Hogg\" by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit.\" J.G. Ballard, prolific speculative fiction author and elder statesman of transgressive literature, also praised Delany's work, citing the medium of pornography as being the \"most political form of fiction.\""}
{"text":"Author Dennis Cooper said in his collection \"Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries\" that \"\"Hogg\" is tiresome and indulgent\" and that the \"pace is molasses-slow\". However, he also goes on to say that \"the book is a highly charged object...[and] that's reason enough to recommend it.\" In the Preface to a later edition of \"Smothered in Hugs,\" Cooper writes, \"I now think Samuel Delany's \"Hogg\" is a great novel, and I don't know why I didn't realize that upon first reading.\""}
{"text":"Jeffrey A. Tucker, associate professor of English at the University of Rochester, comments in his critical study \"A sense of wonder: Samuel R. Delany, race, identity and difference\" that \"Hogg\" \"gave expression to the author's hostility toward a heterosexist society, an anger that had no socially constructive outlet prior to the modern Gay Rights movement.\""}
{"text":"Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of vignettes revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States. The vignettes alternate in structure between narrative prose, poetry, and play-like passages of dialogue. As a result, the novel has been classified as a composite novel or as a short story cycle. Though some characters and situations recur between vignettes, the vignettes are mostly freestanding, tied to the other vignettes thematically and contextually more than through specific plot details."}
{"text":"The ambitious, nontraditional structure of the novel \u2013 and its later influence on future generations of writers \u2013 have helped \"Cane\" gain status as a classic of modernism. Several of the vignettes have been excerpted or anthologized in literary collections; the poetic passage \"Harvest Song\" has been included in multiple Norton poetry anthologies. The poem opens with the line: \"I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown.\""}
{"text":"Jean Toomer began writing sketches that would become the first section of \"Cane\" in November 1921 on a train from Georgia to Washington D.C. By Christmas of 1921, the first draft of those sketches and the short story \u201cKabnis\u201d were complete. Waldo Frank, Toomer\u2019s close friend, suggested that Toomer combine the sketches into a book. In order to form a book-length manuscript, Toomer added sketches relating to the black urban experience. When Toomer completed the book, he wrote: \u201cMy words had become a book\u2026I had actually finished something.\u201d"}
{"text":"However, before the book was published, Toomer\u2019s initial euphoria began to fade. He wrote, \u201cThe book is done but when I look for the beauty I thought I\u2019d caught, they thin out and elude me.\u201d He thought that the Georgia sketches lacked complexity and said they were \u201ctoo damn simple for me.\u201d In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer wrote that the story-teller style of \u201cFern\u201d \u201chad too much waste and made too many appeals to the reader.\u201d"}
{"text":"Toomer spent a great deal of time working on the structure of \"Cane\". He said that the design was a circle. Aesthetically, \"Cane\" builds from simple to complex forms; regionally, it moves from the South to the North and then back to the South; and spiritually, it begins with \u201cBona and Paul,\u201d grows through the Georgia narratives, and ends in \u201cHarvest Song.\u201d The first section focuses on southern folk culture; the second section focuses on urban life in Washington D.C. and Chicago; and the third section is about the racial conflicts experienced by a black Northerner living in the South."}
{"text":"In his autobiography, Toomer wrote: \u201cI realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city\u2014and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into \"Cane\". \"Cane\" was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.\u201d"}
{"text":"\"Cane\" was not widely read when it was published but was generally praised by both black and white critics. Montgomery Gregory, an African American, wrote in his 1923 review: \"America has waited for its own counterpart of Maran\u2014for that native son who would avoid the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand. One whose soul mirrored the soul of his people, yet whose vision was universal. Jean Toomer\u2026is the answer to this call.\" Gregory criticized Toomer for his labored and puzzling style and for Toomer\u2019s overuse of the folk. Gregory believed that Toomer was biased towards folk culture and resented city life."}
{"text":"W. E. B. Du Bois reviewed \"Cane\" in 1924, saying: \"Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings.\" Du Bois goes on to say that Toomer does not depict an exact likeness of humans but rather depicts them like an Impressionist painter. Du Bois also wrote that Toomer\u2019s writing is deliberately puzzling\u2014\"I cannot, for the life of me, for instance, see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could understand instead of vaguely guess at.\""}
{"text":"In his 1939 review \"The New Negro\", Sanders Redding wrote: \"\"Cane\" was experimental, a potpourri of poetry and prose, in which the latter element is significant because of the influence it had on the course of Negro fiction.\""}
{"text":"White critics who reviewed \"Cane\" in 1923 were mostly positive about the novel, praising its new portrayal of African Americans. John Armstrong wrote: \"It can perhaps be safely said that the Southern negro, at least, has found an authentic lyric voice in Jean Toomer\u2026there is nothing of the theatrical coon-strutting high-brown, none of the conventional dice-throwing, chicken-stealing nigger of musical comedy and burlesque in the pages of \"Cane\".\" He goes on to say, \u201cthe Negro has been libeled rather than depicted accurately in American fiction\u201d because fiction typically portrays African Americans as stereotypes. Cane gave white readers a chance to see a human portrayal of blacks\u2014\u201c[blacks] were seldom ever presented to white eyes with any other sort of intelligence than that displayed by an idiot child with epilepsy.\u201d"}
{"text":"Robert Littell wrote in his 1923 review that \"\"Cane\" does not remotely resemble any of the familiar, superficial views of the South on which we have been brought up. On the contrary, Mr. Toomer\u2019s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist.\""}
{"text":"Alice Walker said of the book, \"It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.\""}
{"text":"In \"The Negro Novel in America\", Robert A. Bone wrote: \"By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, \"Cane\" ranks with Richard Wright\u2019s \"Native Son\" and Ralph Ellison\u2019s \"Invisible Man\" as a measure of the Negro novelist\u2019s highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style.\""}
{"text":"Gerald Strauss points out that despite \"critical uncertainty and controversy,\" he finds that \"Cane\"'s structure is not without precedent: \"it is similar to James Joyce\u2019s \"Dubliners\" (1914) and Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \"Winesburg, Ohio\" (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters\u2019s poetry collection \"Spoon River Anthology\" (1915) ... Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally.\""}
{"text":"In 1973, Alice Walker and fellow Zora Neale Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered a grave they thought was Hurston's in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON \/ \"A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH\" \/ NOVELIST FOLKLORIST \/ ANTHROPOLOGIST \/ 1901\u20131960. The line \"a genius of the south\" is from Toomer's poem \"Georgia Dusk\", which appears in the novel. Hurston, who could be deceptive about her age, was actually born in 1891, not 1901."}
{"text":"The novel inspired the Gil Scott-Heron song \"Cane\", in which he sings about two main characters of the novel: Karintha and Becky."}
{"text":"The novel inspired Marion Brown in his \"Georgia\" trilogy of jazz albums, especially on \"Geechee Recollections\" (1973), where he put \"Karintha\" to music, recited by Bill Hasson."}
{"text":"\"The Bluest Eye,\" published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. The novel takes place in Lorain, Ohio (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola who grew up following the Great Depression. Set in 1941, the story tells that she is consistently regarded as \"ugly\" due to her mannerisms and dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she equates with \"whiteness\"."}
{"text":"The novel is told from Claudia MacTeer's point of view. She is the daughter of Pecola's foster parents at different stages in her life. In addition, there is an omniscient third-person narrative that includes inset narratives in the first person. The book's controversial topics of racism, incest, and child molestation have led to numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries."}
{"text":"Morrison was an African-American novelist, a Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize winner whose works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States."}
{"text":"The novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and Pauline, and their struggles as African Americans in a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. Pauline now works as a servant for a wealthier white family. One day in the novel's present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely confusing, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. After raping her a second time, he flees, leaving her pregnant."}
{"text":"Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by raping her. Claudia laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, has used Pecola as a scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier."}
{"text":"Morrison commented on her motivations to write the novel, saying, \"I felt compelled to write this mostly because in the 1960s, black male authors published powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or nonfiction, and they had positive racially uplifting rhetoric with them that were stimulating and I thought they would skip over something and thought no one would remember that it wasn't always beautiful.\""}
{"text":"In an article titled \u201cDecay and Symbolic Impotence in Toni Morrison\u2019s THE BLUEST EYE,\u201d the author examines how several critics have studied the significance of the loss of one of Pauline\u2019s front teeth in The Bluest Eye. Parker argues that Pauline\u2019s missing front tooth symbolizes the \u201cdestructive nature\u201d of white beauty standards."}
{"text":"Blue eyes symbolize the attractiveness and contentment that Pecola associates with the middle class. To Pecola, blue eyes symbolize beauty and associates it with whiteness."}
{"text":"The marigold flowers symbolize the overall safety of Pecola\u2019s baby."}
{"text":"The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Emma Lou in her journey to college at USC and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Emma Lou's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life."}
{"text":"Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl who has extremely dark skin. Her mother's family have lighter skin that shows European ancestry; the \"blue-black\" hue came from her father, who left her and her mother soon after her birth. Believing that her color will reduce her marriageability, her mother's people try to help her lighten her skin with bleaching and commercially available creams, but nothing works. When her mother says \"a black boy could get along but a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment,\" Emma Lou wishes she had been a boy. The only \"Negro pupil in the entire school,\" she feels extra conspicuous at graduation among the white faces and white robes."}
{"text":"Emma Lou's Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California (USC), where she'll be among black students, and he encourages her to study education and move South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise \"encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town.\" Emma Lou\u2019s maternal grandmother was closely associated with the \"blue veins\", black people whose skin was light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought life would be better for Emma Lou in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about."}
{"text":"At USC, Emma Lou intends to meet the \"right\" crowd among other Negro students. On registration day she meets a black girl named Hazel Mason; unfortunately, when she speaks Emma Lou decides that she is the \"wrong\" sort, definitely lower-class. Other girls, though pleasant, never invite her into their circles or sorority, especially when they recognize that they've seen her with Hazel, whose \"minstrel\" demeanor is not good for the black image. When Hazel drops out of school, Grace Giles become Emma Lou's friend but informs her that the sorority only accepts wealthy, light-skinned girls. Emma Lou begins to notice that black leaders tend to have light skin or light-skinned wives. By summer vacation, she feels more trapped by her skin."}
{"text":"Back in Boise, Emma Lou meets Weldon Taylor at a picnic. Although darker than her ideal, he attracts her, and she ends up going too far with him that night, thinking she is in love. Over the next two weeks, she is thrilled to be with Taylor, for \"his presence and his love making.\" He had been to college but temporarily dropped out to build up his tuition fund, traveling from town to town, finding work and a new girl each time. When he announced that he was leaving Boise to become a Pullman porter, Emma Lou blamed her color. She puts in the rest of her college time, then moves to New York City to find work\u2014and hopefully, a better life."}
{"text":"In Harlem, Emma Lou meets a young man named John whom she decides is \"too dark.\" She heads to an employment agency seeking work as a stenographer; lacking experience, she pads her account of her skills. She is sent to a real-estate office for an interview, only to be told that they have someone else in mind. She returns to the agency and the manager, Mrs. Blake, invites her to lunch, and Emma Lou is \"warmed toward any suggestion of friendliness\" and excited to have the chance \"to make a welcome contact.\""}
{"text":"Mrs. Blake tells her about work prospects, saying that black businessmen preferred to hire light-skinned, pretty girls; she advises Emma Lou to go to Columbia Teachers' College and train for a job in the public-school system. After lunch, Emma is walking on Seventh Avenue and while stopping to check her reflection, she notices a few young black men nearby and hears one comment, \"There\u2019s a girl for you \u2018Fats\u2019\", to which the reply is: \"Man, you know I don\u2019t haul no coal.\""}
{"text":"Determined to stay in New York, Emma Lou finds a job as a maid to Arline Strange, an actress \"in an alleged melodrama about Negro life in Harlem.\" She thinks all the characters are caricatures. Arline and her brother from Chicago take Emma Lou to her first cabaret one night, where he makes her a drink from his hip flask. Emma Lou, entranced by the dancing, gets to be part of it when a man from another table, Alva, invites her. When the lights go up, he returns her to sit with Arline and her brother. The next morning, Alva and his roommate Braxton discuss the previous evening, agreeing that Alva did Emma Lou a favor in dancing with her."}
{"text":"Intrigued by the cabaret, Emma Lou talks to the stage director about being in the dance chorus. He tells her plainly the girls are chosen in part for appearance, and notes they all have lighter skin than hers. She decides to look for a new place to live, hoping to meet \"the right sort of people.\""}
{"text":"One evening she goes to a casino, where she recognizes Alva. When she approaches him and asks if he remembers her, he politely acts like he does: he talks to her, dances with her, and even gives her his phone number. She calls him a couple of times before they make plans. Braxton is critical of Alva's seeing her, but he thinks, \"She\u2019s just as good as the rest, and you know what they say, \u2018The Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.\u2019\""}
{"text":"After avoiding taking Emma Lou to parties or dances, not wanting his friends to meet her (preferring to be seen with light-skinned Geraldine), Alva finally takes her to a \"rent party. Used to manipulating young women for money, Alva liked Geraldine for herself. Emma Lou was very excited about the party, and worried that she would encounter more discrimination. Once there, they happened on to a conversation revolving around race: the differences between being a mulatto and a Negro, and individuals who are prejudiced or \"color struck.\""}
{"text":"At the rent party, Emma had consumed more alcohol than usual, and the next morning her landlady demands that she find somewhere else to stay. As the woman speaks, Emma Lou remembers a little more about Alva bringing her home after the party and realizes that the woman might be right that her behavior hadn't met the boardinghouse's respectable standards. Emma Lou thought more about Alva, who seemed kinder than others in her life, but she was aware of his manipulation."}
{"text":"Alva has his own trouble with Braxton: he has no job and pays no rent. When Braxton finally moves out, Alva doesn't want Emma Lou to move in. One night the couple goes to a theatre, but Emma Lou doesn't have a good time: \"You\u2019re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I\u2019ll be insulted.\" One night, after an argument with Emma Lou, Alva returns to his room to find Geraldine sleeping in his bed; when she wakens, she announces that she's pregnant by him."}
{"text":"Two years later, Emma Lou works as a personal maid\/companion to Clere Sloane, a retired actress married to Campbell Kitchen, a white writer very interested in Harlem. He encouraged Emma Lou to seek more education in order to achieve economic independence. She has few friends and still feels very out-of-place. When she tries to see Alva after they had stopped seeing each other for a time, Geraldine answers the door and Emma Lou leaves without comment."}
{"text":"Geraldine and Alva's son has been born disfigured and possibly retarded and seems to bring them endless trouble; they often wish he would die. Geraldine blames Alva\u2014another man would have made a better baby\u2014and her mother blames both of them for not bothering to marry before his birth (or conception). Alva has become a money-wasting alcoholic; Geraldine works hard, trying to build up an escape fund."}
{"text":"Having moved to the Y.W.C.A., Emma Lou has found some new friends and is studying teaching. She continues to work hard but to feel no better about her appearance, although her friend Gwendolyn Johnson tries to help her. She starts seeing Benson Brown, a light-skinned man described as a \"yaller nigger.\" His appearance seems reason enough to see him. But when she learns that Geraldine had abandoned Alva and their son, she goes to check on them and he soon has her taking care of little Alva Jr. After 6 months, she begins teaching at a Harlem public school, wearing much dark-skin-concealing makeup but being teased for it by colleagues. She nurtures the child better than his parents ever did, but she and Alva have a rocky relationship."}
{"text":"As Emma Lou gains more economic independence, she discovers that it isn't everything; she's still not happy. She decides to leave Alva and his son. When she returns to the Y.W.C.A. she contacts Benson, who announces that he and Gwendolyn have been dating and have decided to marry. They even invite her to the wedding."}
{"text":"Emma Lou realizes she has spent her life running: she ran from Boise's color prejudice; she left Los Angeles for similar reasons. But she decides never to run again. She knows there are many people like her and that she has to accept herself."}
{"text":"Thurman's novel has been widely discussed. Through Emma Lou Morgan, he expressed the idea that dark skin presented more problems for a woman than a man. The young woman struggles with people's reactions to her."}
{"text":"In 2004 Daniel Scott III published an article noting that Thurman was interested in Harlem in the 1920s as a place for personal transformation. He was aware that people were attracted there from all over the United States, and brought expectations with them. The experience of living there opened them to new possibilities, which he expressed in his first novel. People were stimulated by meeting many new strangers, and by opportunities afforded by clubs, cabarets, concert halls, theatres and other venues."}
{"text":"The novel's line \"the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice\" is referenced in Tupac Shakur's 1993 song Keep Ya Head Up, as well as Pharoahe Monch's 2007 song Let's Go and \"Run and Tell That\" from the musical Hairspray. Kendrick Lamar's 2015 song The Blacker the Berry is named after the novel."}
{"text":"Hip Hop High School (2006) is a novel by American author Alan Lawrence Sitomer. It's the second in the Hoopster Trilogy."}
{"text":"Theresa Anderson: the main protagonist of the story. She goes through a lot throughout her high school years"}
{"text":"Cee-Saw: Tee-Ay\u2019s best friend who gets pregnant and drops out"}
{"text":"Sonia Rodriguez: Tee-Ay\u2019s other best friend who\u2019s Mexican-American"}
{"text":"Devon: another friend whom she works with on the SAT"}
{"text":"Homeboyz is a 2007 young adult fiction novel written by California teacher Alan Lawrence Sitomer. It is the third and final book of the Hoopster Trilogy. The book won the Top Ten Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers award from the American Library Association in 2008."}
{"text":"Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations."}
{"text":"The novel was selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation's \"5 under 35\" award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. It received the Hemingway Foundation\/PEN Award for 2017, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature."}
{"text":"Effia is raised by her mother, Baaba, who is cruel to her. Nevertheless she works hard to please her mother. Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but when her mother tells her to hide her menstrual cycle, rumours spread that she is barren. As a result she married a British man, James Collins, the governor of Cape Coast Castle. He and Effia have a happy marriage. She returns to her family village one time, when her father dies, where her brother tells her that Baaba is not Effia's mother and that Effia is the daughter of an unknown slave."}
{"text":"Quey's son, James, learns that his Asante grandfather died and returns to Asante land where he meets a farmer woman, Akosua Mensah. Growing up with his parents dysfunctional political marriage, and promised since childhood to the daughter of the Fante chief, Amma, James longs to run away and marry Akosua. With help from Effia, James runs away from Amma and lives among the Efutu people until they are raided and killed by the Asantes. He is saved by a man who recognizes him though James makes him promise to tell everyone he has died. He then travels to reunite with Akosua."}
{"text":"Esi is the beloved and beautiful daughter of a Big Man and his wife, Maame. Her father is a renowned and successful warrior and he eventually captures a slave who asks Esi to send a message to her father about where she is. Esi complies out of pity as her mother was formerly enslaved. As a result her village is raided and her father and mother are killed. Before she leaves Esi learns that her mother had a child before her, while she was enslaved. She is then captured and imprisoned in the dungeon of the Cape Coast Castle where she is raped by a drunk British officer before being sent to America."}
{"text":"Carson, who as an adult goes by the name Sonny, tries to find meaning in marching for civil rights and working for the NAACP but instead becomes demoralized by his work. Like his own father he becomes an absentee parent to three children by three different women, often dodging their requests for alimony. He meets a young singer named Amani and after she introduces him to drugs he becomes addicted to heroin as well. He spends all of his money on drugs and realizes he never loved Amani, but only wanted her. When Willie finally reveals details about his father and offers him a choice between her money or getting clean he chooses to stay with his mother and get clean."}
{"text":"The novel touches on several notable historical events, from the introduction of cacao as a crop in Ghana and the Anglo-Asante wars in Ghana to slavery and segregation in America. Because of the novel's scope, which covers several hundred years of history and fourteen characters, it has been described as \"a novel in short stories\" where \"each chapter is forced to stand on its own.\""}
{"text":"In the summer of 2009, following her sophomore year at Stanford University, Gyasi took a trip to Ghana sponsored by a research grant. Although Gyasi was born in Ghana, she moved to the United States as an infant, and this was her first trip back. On a friend's prompting, they visited the Cape Coast Castle, where she found her inspiration in the contrast between the luxurious upper levels (for colonists and their local families) and the misery of the dungeons below, where slaves were kept. She relates: \"I just found it really interesting to think about how there were people walking around upstairs who were unaware of what was to become of the people living downstairs.\""}
{"text":"Gyasi says the family tree came first, and each chapter, which follows one descendant, is tied to a significant historical event, although she described the research as \"wide but shallow.\" \"The Door of No Return\" by British historian William St Clair helped to form the descriptions of life in and around the Castle in the first few chapters. One of the final chapters, entitled \"Marjorie\", is inspired by Gyasi's experiences as part of an immigrant family living in Alabama."}
{"text":"Before the official publication in June 2016, \"Time\"'s Sarah Begley called it \"one of the summer\u2019s most-anticipated novels\"."}
{"text":"Leilani Clark at KQED Arts wrote: \"Until every American embarks on a major soul-searching about the venal, sordid racial history of the United States, and their own position in relation to it, the bloodshed, tears, and anger will keep on. Let \"Homegoing\" be an inspiration to begin that process.\""}
{"text":"In 2019, the book was listed in 'Paste' as the third-greatest novel of the 2010s."}
{"text":"On November 5, 2019, the \"BBC News\" listed \"Homegoing\" on its list of the 100 most influential novels."}
{"text":"Ta-Nehisi Coates selected \"Homegoing\" for the National Book Foundation's 2016 \"5 under 35\" award, announced in September 2016. \"Homegoing\" was shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, which eventually went to \"The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter\" by Kia Corthron."}
{"text":"The novel was subsequently awarded the John Leonard Award for publishing year 2016 by the National Book Critics Circle for outstanding debut novel in January 2017. In February 2017, Swansea University announced \"Homegoing\" had made the longlist for the 2017 Dylan Thomas Prize for the best published literary work in the English language written by an author aged 39 or younger. The novel was the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2017, a nominee for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a nominee for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2018."}
{"text":"Leaving Atlanta is the first novel by the American author Tayari Jones. The book was published by Warner Books in 2002. Jones's experiences through the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1981 largely inspired the book. During the time of the murders, Jones attended Oglethorpe Elementary School, which is located in Athens, Georgia. The book focuses on the lives and experiences of three fictional fifth graders at Oglethorpe Elementary: Tasha Baxter\", Rodney\" \"Green,\" and Octavia Fuller\".\" The book is dedicated to \"twenty-nine and more,\" of the children who were kidnapped and killed before, during, and after the Atlanta Child Murders."}
{"text":"\"Leaving Atlanta\" focuses on three fictional students at Oglethorpe Elementary School: Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Fuller. Jones chose to use children's perspectives for her novel, \"to make a record of how life was for those of us who were too young to understand the complicated social and political landscape of Atlanta, the 'city too busy to hate.'\u201d \"Leaving Atlanta\" explores the interconnectedness of age, race, class, and politics in the proclaimed \u2018Black Mecca\u2019 during the Atlanta Child Murders."}
{"text":"In her \"Author's Note,\" Jones mentions she made some alterations to the historic chronology of the Atlanta Child Murders to suit the novel."}
{"text":"When the Child Murders began, Jones was nine years old, attending Oglethorpe Elementary School. She writes in the \"Reader's Guide\" for the book, \"but the time had come for someone of my generation, to tell the tale from the vantage point of the playground. This novel is a memorial to twenty-nine (or more) who did not survive and it the testimony of the thousands who will never forget.\""}
{"text":"While Jones is from Atlanta, writing about Atlanta is not intentional. Jones has noted that she writes what she knows, which is her hometown of Atlanta and the people in it. This has led her contemporaries to consider her a Southern writer, a label that she does not reject but recognizes it as one part of who she is as a writer."}
{"text":"Each part of the novel is written from a different narrative point of view. \u201cPart One: Magic Words\u201d is written in the third-person through LaTasha Baxter\u2019s perspective; \u201cPart Two: The Opposite Direction of Home\u201d is written in the second-person through Rodney Green\u2019s perspective; and \u201cPart Three: Sweet Pea\u201d is written in the first-person through Octavia Fuller\u2019s perspective."}
{"text":"Because the story is told through the perspective of children it focuses on the experience of humanity instead of humanity fighting against oppressive forces. The innocence of children is taken into perspective, and the reader sees the world through the eyes of pure-hearted children."}
{"text":"LaTasha Baxter returns to school after summer vacation, having practiced jacks and jump rope, as she tries to fit into the social structure of her fifth grade classroom. At the same time, she is dealing with her parents' separation, and the reality that children are going missing and turning up dead. In the novel, the murders are initially introduced when nine photos of children are shown while Tasha Baxter and her family watch the news, which Monica Kaufman, the first black woman to anchor the Atlanta evening news, delivers."}
{"text":"One night Tasha goes to the roller rink with her best friend. At the roller rink, she runs into her crush, Jashante. He buys her M&Ms and gives her a pine scented air freshener, which he usually sells for cash. When Jashante disappears, Tasha blames herself for his disappearance and subsequent death, since she cursed him after he pushed her on the playground, ripping the pink coat her father gave her. At the end of part one, Tasha gives her little sister, DeShaun, Jashante's air freshener, telling DeShaun it is a protective charm."}
{"text":"In Part One, Octavia Fuller and Rodney Green are introduced as the social outcasts of Tasha's fifth grade classroom. Tasha briefly befriends Octavia but ultimately does not pursue their friendship because Tasha is afraid of becoming a social outcast through association with Octavia, who many of their classmates bully because of her dark skin."}
{"text":"Part Two: The Opposite Direction of Home."}
{"text":"Rodney Green, a fifth grader at Oglethorpe Elementary, is introduced with a scene highlighting Rodney's fear of his father. Throughout Part Two, Rodney and Octavia begin to develop a friendship, in part as a result of both being ignored or made fun of by the rest of their classmates. This section also shows Rodney's habit of stealing candy from a local gas station, which he shares with his little sister and Octavia. However, Rodney has a good relationship with Mrs. Lewis, the gas station owner. Mrs. Lewis is a parental figure for Rodney."}
{"text":"Because of the events of Part One, Rodney's class receives a visit from a police officer named Officer Brown, to speak about \"personal safety\". Rodney expresses that, because of the visit, he's more nervous about the murders because Officer Brown is the only protection they have against being attacked and murdered. At the end of the visit, Officer Brown shows the class a genuine police badge, stating that a person pretending to be an officer will not have one, specifying that only genuine officers' badges have raised lettering."}
{"text":"One day, Rodney gets caught stealing candy from Mrs. Lewis after trying to help his classmate Leon, and she tells him to be careful of who he hangs around with. The section ends with Rodney running away after his father beats him in front of his classmates for stealing candy. As he is running away, a man in a blue sedan stops him and claims to be a police officer. The police badge he shows to Rodney is an obvious fake because of its shape and smooth surface. Although Rodney states that he knows the man is not a real police officer, Rodney gets into the van anyway because he wants to go in the opposite direction of home and away from his abusive father."}
{"text":"Part Three of \"Leaving Atlanta\" focuses on Octavia Fuller, who is called Sweet Pea by her loved ones. In this section of the novel, Octavia deals with the grief of Rodney's kidnapping and assumed death. Octavia also deals with the guilt of feeling like it is her fault that her Uncle Kevin was kicked out of their house. Octavia's intentions were to \"save\" her uncle from the doctor turning away medical treatment, after her mother told her needles found on the ground and being picked up will result in a doctor refusing to help. Octavia innocently informs her mother that her uncle had needles in bag while he was living with them. Octavia is also trying to navigate her relationship with her mother."}
{"text":"While walking to school one day, Octavia and her neighbors come across a Guardian Angel from New York that was acting as a neighborhood watch \u2014 guarding the children in the neighborhood. On their way to school, Delvis, Octavia's friend and neighbor asks the Guardian Angel, \u201cThey don\u2019t have no black Angels in New York that they could have sent down here?\u201d Octavia says, \u201cDelvis, them Angels alright. When I saw them on the news they were with Miss Camille Bell. They work the evenings with the Bat Patrollers.\u201d"}
{"text":"Ultimately, Octavia's mother sends her to away from Atlanta to live with her father, who works for a university, in South Carolina, step mother, and step baby sister. Octavia's mother, Yvonne, wants her daughter to have better life opportunities than she feels she can provide her daughter. Further, Yvonne wants Octavia to avoid the kidnappings and child murders happening in Atlanta, especially after Octavia gave scared her mother by deliberately going to a park close to home one day while her mother was at work. Octavia knew not to leave her house when her mother was working considering all the child disappearances that were occurring."}
{"text":"\"Leaving Atlanta\" was first published by Warner Publishing on August 1, 2002. When Time Warner Book Group was sold to Hachette Book Group in 2006 the company became Grand Central Publishing under Hachette Book Group, which \"Leaving Atlanta\" is now published under."}
{"text":"The publisher, Grand Central Publishing, describes \"Leaving Atlanta\" as fiction and coming-of-age. As the book was inspired by and focuses on the Atlanta child murders of 1979 - 1981, the novel is also historical fiction."}
{"text":"In 2007, Aletha Spann of 30Nineteen Productions sought to renew the film rights for the novel. The film rights for the novel were officially bought by Spann in 2011. However, there is no known movie currently in production."}
{"text":"Melanie Benson Taylor addresses the diasporic effect of the specific brand of racially motivated murder: leaving via death or leaving to escape death in the case of Octavia. Jones and Toni Cade Bambara through \"Those Bones are Not My Child\", create a fictional picture of the very real diaspora post and pre Child Murders. James Baldwin also explores this in his essay, \"The Evidence of Things Not Seen\"."}
{"text":"\"Leaving Atlanta\" has received several awards and accolades including being chosen in 2013 by Brazos Valley Reads, an organization lead by Texas A&M University\u2019s Department of English. The program provided Jones an opportunity to travel to College Station for a public reading and attend other literary events."}
{"text":"After \"Leaving Atlanta\" was initially released, Bookpage acknowledged, as one of the best twenty-five debut novels of the decade in 2002. The Hurston\/Wright Foundation also awarded the novel its award for Debut Fiction. Local to the events, \"Leaving Atlanta\" was named \u201cNovel of the Year\u201d by Atlanta Magazine and the \u201c\"Best Southern Novel of the Year\" by Creative Loafing Atlanta."}
{"text":"Jane Dystel, describes the novel as a \u201cstrongly grounded tale\u201d that \u201chums with the rhythms of schoolyard life\u201d in her 2002 Publishers Weekly review. In 2002, Kirkus Reviews described the novel as \u201ctechnically ambitious, but not a story otherwise out of the ordinary. Leslie Marmon Silko called the book, \"[a] wonderful novel,\" adding: \"I look forward to reading Jones's work for years to come.\""}
{"text":"In a 2002 Book Page review Arlene McKanic accounts for Jones' writing by saying \"but this powerful new novel isn\u2019t what you might think. To her credit, Jones doesn\u2019t present us with the point of view of the murderer,\" \"What\u2019s more remarkable is that she presents the voices of these children with rare precision.\" McKanic further goes on to say \"The book\u2019s ending is one of the most quietly devastating this reviewer has ever read. Leaving Atlanta, which deals with the effects of serial murder, is simply brilliant a gentle and beautiful book on a horrific subject. \""}
{"text":"A Gathering of Old Men is a novel by Ernest J. Gaines published in 1983."}
{"text":"Set on a 1970s Louisiana cane farm, the novel addresses racial discrimination and a bond that cannot be usurped."}
{"text":"In 1987 Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff, a famous German director, made a film, also titled \"A Gathering of Old Men\" (aka \"Murder on the Bayou\"), which adheres closely to the novel. It stars Richard Widmark (as Sheriff Mapes), Louis Gossett Jr. (as Mathu), Holly Hunter (as Candy), Joe Seneca (as Clatoo), and Will Patton (as Lou Dimes)."}
{"text":"The Vanishing Half is a historical fiction novel by American author Brit Bennett. It is her second novel and was published by Riverhead Books in 2020. It debuted at number one on \"The New York Times\" fiction best-seller list. HBO acquired the rights to develop a limited series with Bennett as executive producer. \"The Vanishing Half\" garnered acclaim from book critics, and was found by Emily Temple of Literary Hub to be the 2020 book most frequently listed among the year's best, making 25 lists."}
{"text":"The novel has a nonlinear narrative structure."}
{"text":"The novel debuted at number one on \"The New York Times\" fiction best-seller list. As of the week ending February 20, 2021, the novel has spent 38 weeks on the list."}
{"text":"It was selected for the \"New York Times Book Review\"s \"10 Best Books of 2020\" list."}
{"text":"Within a month of publication it was reported that HBO had acquired the rights for \"low seven-figures\" to develop a limited series with Brit Bennett as executive producer."}
{"text":"Queen Sugar is the debut novel of American writer Natalie Baszile, published by Penguin in 2014. Set in contemporary Louisiana, it tells the story of Charley Bordelon, a young African-American widow from Los Angeles, California, who moves to a rural town to manage a sugarcane farm she had unexpectedly inherited there from her father."}
{"text":"Charley's estranged older half-brother Ralph Angel, a former drug addict and the child of their father's relationship with his high school sweetheart in St. Joseph, returns to town with his son, Blue. Angel is deeply embittered that his father left him nothing, and he also resents Charley for having been raised by a man who essentially abandoned him."}
{"text":"Charley refuses to hire Angel. He finds low-paying menial labor in the rural community and slides back to drug abuse."}
{"text":"Charley meets a white farmer, Remy Newell, a divorc\u00e9 who seems attracted to her. Their courtship is short lived after Remy makes insensitive racial comments. But after some encouragement from her aunt Violet, Charley decides to give Remy another chance. He asks his goddaughter, elected as Queen Sugar for the annual festival, to invite her daughter Micah to be an honorary member of her court and ride on the parade float with her, and the young girl is thrilled."}
{"text":"Miss Honey forces Charley to give Angel a job. He is resentful of the menial assignment and later tells Charley she should be ashamed of dating a white man. Charley fires him. To get revenge Angel steals the money Miss Honey keeps in her house and a statue. Charley's father had given her \"The Cane Cutter\", and she planned to sell it at auction to raise money to complete the cane harvest."}
{"text":"On Micah's birthday, Charley discovers \"The Cane Cutter\" is gone, and believes that she faces financial ruin. The rest of the family immediately thinks that Angel stole the statue but Miss Honey denies it; nonetheless, she refuses to let anyone call the police. A few days later Angel returns and confesses he stole the piece. During an altercation with his cousin, John, a correctional officer, Angel shoots and wound him. He is soon caught by police who, seeing his gun, fatally shoot him."}
{"text":"Charley is devastated by the loss of the artwork and the death of her brother. Preparing to meet with Landy and Baron to accept their offer for her farm, she happens to tell Hollywood, a former friend of Angel, her predicament. He offers to give her the $50,000 she needs to complete harvesting. He has saved a small fortune through mowing lawns for $5 an hour."}
{"text":"Charley completes the harvest and prepares for the following season. She and Remy continue their relationship, and she starts the process of adopting her nephew Blue. She learns that Angel never sold \"The Cane Cutter\", and kept it in his trunk. After the statue is returned to Charley, she promises it to Blue when he grows up."}
{"text":"\"Queen Sugar\" received mostly positive reviews. Critics praised its characters, conflict, use of its setting, and prose style, while some criticized its pacing. The novel was named one of the San Francisco Chronicle's best books of 2014."}
{"text":"In 2014, the Oprah television network OWN negotiated a deal for the rights to adapt the book as a television series. It was created, directed, and executive produced by Ava DuVernay. Oprah Winfrey served as an executive producer."}
{"text":"The series airs on Oprah Winfrey Network and premiered on September 6, 2016. It was still running in 2021."}
{"text":"Baszile attended local schools. She initially studied finance and economics in college, as her father wanted her to go into his family business. She felt she most came alive in her English classes. She started working with her father in his business after college, but also continued her writing."}
{"text":"Baszile eventually changed fields and graduated from UCLA with an M.A. in Afro-American Studies and a MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College. She started writing what became \"Queen Sugar\" inn the 1990s, exploring an African-American-themed tale of endurance and hope in the American South. She worked on the text for ten years. She sent her manuscript to publishers in 2009 but without any success. After revising the book for two years, she resubmitted the text, and one agent agreed to represent her."}
{"text":"Baszile attended a women writer's retreat in Hedgebrook. Her friend and novelist Sarah Manyika, who also attended, suggested that Baszile read part of a chapter from \"Queen Sugar\" to the group. Attendee Leigh Haber, book editor for \"O, The Oprah Magazine\", loved the novel and passed it to people at Harpo for their review. A few months after that, Harpo called Baszile to say they wanted to option the book for a project."}
{"text":"Salvage the Bones is a novel by American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Bloomsbury in 2011. The novel explores the plight of a working-class African-American family in Mississippi as they prepare for Hurricane Katrina and follows them through the aftermath of the storm. Ward, who had lived through Katrina, wrote the novel, after being very \"dissatisifed with the way Katrina had receded from public consciousness\". The novel was the 2011 recipient of the National Book Award for Fiction."}
{"text":"In an interview with the \"Paris Review\", Ward said she drew inspiration from \"Medea\" and the works of William Faulkner."}
{"text":"As a winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, the novel received a largely positive reception. The \"LA Times\" described it as an \"under-the-radar\" second novel, which deserves the award. The reviewer described the book as a successful depiction of Southern life and culture and \"an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor.\" Similarly the \"New York Times Sunday Book Review\" called the novel \"a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written.\" \"The Washington Post\" wrote that \"it\u2019ll be a long time before its magic wears off\" and that the novel has the \"aura of a classic about it.\""}
{"text":"Iola Leroy, \"or Shadows Uplifted\", an 1892 novel by Frances E. W. Harper, is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman. While following what has been termed the \"sentimental\" conventions of late nineteenth-century writing about women, it also deals with serious social issues of education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility."}
{"text":"Iola Leroy, the principal character of the novel."}
{"text":"Harriet Johnson, Iola Leroy's grandmother. While a slave of Nancy Johnson, she resists a whipping. As a punishment, she is sold."}
{"text":"Robert Johnson. He is still a child when separated from his mother Harriet. His enslaver, Nancy Johnson, sees him as a \"pet animal\" and teaches him to read. As a young man, he becomes the leader of a group of slaves who decide to seek refuge with the Union army during the Civil War. He enlists in a colored regiment and is promoted to lieutenant. On account of his white skin, his superiors council him to change to a white regiment for better chances of promotion, but he refuses. After the war, he successfully runs a hardware store."}
{"text":"Marie Leroy, Iola's mother. A small child when brutally separated from her mother Harriet Johnson, she finally becomes the slave of wealthy Eugene Leroy. When Eugene becomes seriously ill, she nurses him back to health. He sets her free, has her educated and marries her in a secret ceremony. Although she is so white that \"no one would suspect that she has one drop of negro blood in her veins\", the marriage results in the Leroy family becoming social outcasts."}
{"text":"Harry Leroy, Iola's brother. Like Iola, he is educated in a North. The African ancestry of their mother is concealed from the children, and they are not allowed to pass their vacations at home, spending that time instead together with the parents in a northern holiday resort. When he learns that his father has died and his mother and sister are enslaved, he becomes seriously ill from the shock. When he recovers, the Civil War has begun and he decides to enlist in a colored regiment, making the recruiting officer wonder why a white man should want to do that."}
{"text":"Dr. Frank Latimer, the man who Iola finally marries. He was born into slavery as the son of an enslaved mother of predominantly European ancestry and a white man. After emancipation, his mother invested her hard earnings to pay for his studies. He graduated as a medical doctor and afterwards met his white grandmother, the rich mother of his deceased father, who offered to \"adopt him as her heir, if he would ignore his identity with the colored race\". Although no trace of his African ancestry was visible in his appearance, he declined the offer."}
{"text":"Lucille Delany, a black woman with apparently no European ancestry, the founder of a school for \"future wives and mothers\", and the woman who Harry finally marries."}
{"text":"Tom Anderson, friend of Robert Johnson. He seeks refuge with the Union army together with Johnson, causes the commander to set Iola free, joins the army and dies in Iola's care from wounds he received while knowingly sacrificing himself in order to save his comrades."}
{"text":"Aunt Linda, enslaved cook of Nancy Johnson who has a special liking for Robert. She is illiterate and speaks in black dialect, yet she is among the black female characters of the novel who are intelligent, loyal to each other and of central importance to their community."}
{"text":"Uncle Daniel, elder friend of Robert Johnson. When Robert and his group seek refuge with the Union army, he stays behind because he doesn't want to break his promise to his absent master."}
{"text":"Dr. Gresham, military physician. He falls in love with Iola while he still thinks that she is white. When informed that she is \"colored\", his love helps him to overcome his prejudice, and he proposes to Iola at two different points of the story. When rejected for the second time, \"sympathy, love, and admiration were blended in the parting look he gave her\"."}
{"text":"Dr. Latrobe, physician from the South. He is mentioned only in chapters 26, \"Open Questions\", and 28, \"Dr. Latrobe's Mistake\". In a discussion, he voices the view of southern white supremacists."}
{"text":"In a North Carolina town which is only identified as \"C\u2014\", a group of slaves led by Robert Johnson seek refuge with the Union army that is approaching in the course of the Civil War. Robert's friend Tom Anderson then informs the Union commander of a beautiful young woman held as slave in the neighborhood who is subsequently set free by the commander."}
{"text":"The narrative then returns to the events following Iola's rescue by the Union army: Robert Johnson and Tom Anderson join the army \"to strike a blow for freedom\", while Iola becomes a nurse in a military hospital. When Robert is entrusted to her care after being wounded, they tell each other their stories which indicate that Robert is the brother of Iola's mother. After the war, they return to \"C\u2014\" to search for Robert's mother, who they recognize when she tells her story during a prayer meeting."}
{"text":"The family is reunited when they locate Harry who had been fighting in the Union army and met with his and Iola's mother during the war."}
{"text":"Much space is given to discussions in which the characters talk about themes such as temperance, religion, the position of women in society, alleged white superiority, racism and lynchings, and the color line."}
{"text":"Temperance: The damaging effects of alcohol are often discussed in the book. For example, after the war the black characters tell each other of two former masters who took to drink and ended up in the \"pore-house\" (chapters 18, 19). After Robert Johnson has found his long-lost mother, Aunt Linda pours three glasses of her home-made wine so they can celebrate the event. Robert refuses the wine stating, \"I'm a temperance man\", causing the conversion of Aunt Linda to the temperance idea."}
{"text":"Religion: Prayer plays an important role in the life of the black characters: Iola and Robert discover the first clue of their kinship when Iola sings a special hymn at the bedside of the wounded Robert, which he has learned from his mother (chapter 16). Both find Harriet, their lost grandmother and mother, during a prayer meeting (chapter 20)."}
{"text":"When Iola's brother Harry learns that his mother and sister have been reduced to slavery, he asks how such a thing is possible in a \"Christian country\". The principal of his school gives the answer: \"Christian in name\" (chapter 14). After the war and the abolition of slavery, in a discussion with her uncle Robert and Dr. Gresham, Iola states that a \"fuller comprehension of the claims of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and their application to our national life\" is the only \"remedy by which our nation can recover from the evil entailed upon her by slavery\", to which both Robert and Gresham agree (chapter 25)."}
{"text":"In the course of their discussions, the characters also mention Islam. The black pastor, \"Rev. Carmicle\", speaks of the \"imperfect creed\" of \"Mohammedanism\". In another discussion, \"Prof. Gradnor\", a black professor from North Carolina, sees Islamic countries as \"civilized\" and compares them favorably to the southern United States, referring to lynchings and stating, \"I know of no civilized country on the globe, Catholic, Protestant, or Mohammedan, where life is less secure than it is in the South\"."}
{"text":"Women in society: The female characters who exert strong influence on the men in their roles as \"moral forces owe something to Stowe and the cult of true womanhood\", but they are neither \"patterned after the white model\" nor are they silent or submissive. On the contrary, \"Harper shows the necessity for women's voice\". In a \"conversazione\" among educated blacks, Iola and Lucille, the only female participants \"dominate the discussions. ... Their outspoken, sometimes feminist remarks are readily accepted by the men\"."}
{"text":"After Iola and her uncle Robert have moved to the North, Iola tells her uncle that she wants to apply for a job as saleswoman. Robert earns enough so that she doesn't have \"to go out to work\", but she tells him,"}
{"text":"Alleged white superiority: In chapter 17, Iola is teaching black children, when a \"gentleman\" asks to address the class. He talks about the \"achievements of the white race\" and then asks \"how they did it.\""}
{"text":"Positive view of black history: In chapter 30, Lucille Delany says, \"Instead of forgetting the past, I would have [our people] hold in everlasting remembrance our great deliverance.\" Historian David W. Blight quotes this as an example for Harper's work \"to forge a positive view of black history\", an aim she shared with fellow black writer Pauline Hopkins."}
{"text":"\"Iola Leroy\" \"may well have [been] influenced\" by Harriet Jacobs's 1861 autobiography \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\"."}
{"text":"The novel was \"awarded more blame than praise\" by literary critics, but \"initial readers responded positively\", causing the novel to be reprinted until 1895. From then on, however, it was not re-published until 1971."}
{"text":"\"Iola Leroy\" was for some time cited as the first novel written by an African-American woman. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s 1982 discovery of Harriet Wilson's \"Our Nig\" (1859) displaced it from that spot. Still, it remains important as \"the first black vision of black women's roles in reshaping post-Civil War America\" and as a fictional work dealing with complex issues of race, class, and politics in the United States. Recent scholarship suggests that Harper's novel provides a sophisticated understanding of citizenship, gender, and community, particularly the way that African Americans developed hybrid forms of \"gemeinschaft and gesellschaft\" before, during, and after slavery."}
{"text":"The African-American journalist Ida B. Wells took up the pen name \"Iola\" when she first started writing articles about racism in the South."}
{"text":"According to J. F. Yellin, \"Iola Leroy\" \"helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today.\""}
{"text":"Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel by American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Scribner in 2017. It is about a family's dynamics in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was named by \"The New York Times\" as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017."}
{"text":"Ward's third novel, \"Sing, Unburied, Sing\" was published on September 5, 2017, by Scribner."}
{"text":"Joseph (Jojo) is one of the main characters, and also one of the three narrators of the book. He is the child of Michael who is White, and Leonie, who is Black. The story starts on his thirteenth birthday at his maternal grandparents' house in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Jojo throughout the book is often acting like the parent to Kayla because his mother Leonie was not always there. Jojo looks up to his grandfather, and wishes to be like him. Throughout the book, Jojo has many conversations with spirits while helping them move on."}
{"text":"Leonie is the daughter of River and Philomene, and mother to Jojo and Kayla. She is one of the three narrators of the story. Leonie got pregnant at a young age, not certain of wanting to be a mother, since then she has been a mentally absent mother who focused mostly on her love for Michael. Leonie becomes a drug addict, which the high allows her to see her dead brother, Given. Leonie is consumed by her love for Michael and is inattentive to the needs of her children. She is also jealous of her children's relationship because it reminds her of the brother she lost too early in life."}
{"text":"River (Pop) is Jojo's and Kayla's maternal grandfather. He is the Father to Leonie and Given. He is the main parental figure in Jojo's life, which makes him the role model JoJo looks up to. He is quietly dignified and capable. Pop spent some time in Parchman prison when he was young and developed a \"care giver\" relationship with another inmate, Richie. Often shares stories about his time in Parchman with Jojo."}
{"text":"Philomene (Mam) is Jojo and Kayla's maternal grandmother. She is the mother to Leonie and Given. She comes from a long line of women who have been able to heal and communicate with dead people. Mam steps up to look after Jojo and Kayla when she realizes Leonie does not care enough about her children. Mam is sick with cancer when the novel begins. This causes her to be stuck inside the bedroom from chemo treatments, ultimately forcing Leonie to try stepping up as a motherly figure."}
{"text":"Misty who is Leonie's white friend from work. Misty and Leonie are bound to each other by their drug addiction. Misty joins Leonie on the road trip to Parchman to pick up Michael after his release."}
{"text":"Michael is Leonie's boyfriend and the father of Jojo and Kayla. He is white and comes from a racist family that doesn\u2019t accept his relationship with Leonie or their kids. Michael, however, is not racist. At the beginning of the novel, he is in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, for drug trafficking. He then joins his family after Leonie and their children pick him up. Like Leonie, Michael is an absent parent who also does drugs."}
{"text":"Michaela (Kayla) is Jojo's three-year-old little sister. She interacts with Jojo as a parental figure and prefers him to her mother, Leonie. Kayla, like Jojo, is able to see ghosts. Kayla is given the final word of \"shh\" to her brother. Kayla is emblematic of the future. Through Kayla's voice in the final scene, Ward ends this novel on an optimistic note."}
{"text":"Given is Leonie's older brother who was shot on a hunting trip by Michael's cousin when he was a senior in high school. Leonie sees Given's ghost throughout the novel, especially after she uses drugs. It is not until the second to last chapter when Given's ghost is freed, and Leonie does not see him anymore."}
{"text":"Richie knows River from their time spent together in Parchman. He was placed in Parchman at twelve years old for stealing food for his nine siblings. He tried to escape later with an inmate named Blue and both were killed. His ghost follows JoJo back to Pop after JoJo arrives to pick up his father from Parchman because he does not know how he died. Richie is one of the three narrators of the story and struggles to understand and accept his death."}
{"text":"Big Joseph is Michael's father. He does not have a healthy relationship with his son and the rest of the family because Michael decided to be in a relationship with Leonie, an African-American woman. Big Joseph was present at the trial for his nephew shooting Leonie\u2019s brother prior to her and Michael\u2019s relationship which adds to Leonie\u2019s discomfort with Big Joseph. When Michael, Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla visit him, it results in Big Joseph and Michael physically fighting."}
{"text":"Maggie is Michael's mother. She, also, does not have a healthy relationship with her son. Unlike her husband, she is seen wanting to make an effort with her son. She inhospitably welcomes Michael, Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla into their home, in an effort to salvage her relationship with her son."}
{"text":"The next day, Leonie argues with Pop about whether she should take Jojo and Kayla with her on the trip. At Mam's suggestion, she invites her coworker Misty, whose boyfriend is also in Parchman. While she talks to her mom, Leonie realizes that Mam's cancer is getting worse."}
{"text":"The next chapter is narrated by Richie. He recognizes Jojo as Pop's child. He recalls how Pop protected him while they were in Parchman. No one in the car but Jojo and Kayla can see Richie."}
{"text":"On the drive back, they are pulled over by a police officer. There is no time to hide the meth Al gave them, so Leonie swallows it. Leonie, without thinking, tells the officer that they are coming back from Parchman. The officer handcuffs Leonie. He also handcuffs Michael. Jojo walks out of the car with Michael and the officer handcuffs him too. Jojo reaches into his pocket to grab the gris-gris bag Pop gave him and the officer pulls out his gun on him. Misty drops Kayla, who runs to Jojo and wraps herself around him. Kayla throws up on the officer and he lets them go."}
{"text":"Back in the car, Leonie, who is high from the meth she swallowed, becomes sick. Michael pulls over at a gas station and gives Jojo money to buy milk and charcoal. Leonie drinks the mixture and throws up.\u00a0Richie tells Jojo that he tried to run from Parchman but died in the process. He doesn\u2019t remember what happened and he needs Pop to tell him so he can go home. Richie was only able to leave Parchman when Jojo showed up."}
{"text":"Leonie enters Mam's room to find her in a terrible state. Her room smells like rot. Mam tells Leonie that it is too late. Mam sees Richie on the ceiling. He is vengeful. Richie shouts at Mam, urging her to come with him, but Given shouts at him that Mam is not his mother. Jojo and Pop run in and Leonie jumps into action and begins saying the litany to summon Maman Brigitte. Jojo tells Richie to leave because nobody owes him anything anymore. Richie leaves and Given takes Mam with him. Mam dies. Michael comes back and he and Leonie leave."}
{"text":"In the final chapter, Jojo explains that he sleeps in Leonie's bed now. Leonie and Michael only come back for two days out of every week, and then they leave again. Pop sleeps in Mam's room now and he talks to himself at night, searching for Mam. Although he hoped he will, Jojo is not able to see Mam and Given, he only sees Richie. He also sees other ghosts who have all died through violent means. Kayla tells the ghosts to go home but they don\u2019t listen to her. She begins to sing and they all smile with relief."}
{"text":"\"Sing, Unburied, Sing\" is the first of Ward's novels to introduce a supernatural element. A dead boy, Ritchie, is one of the narrators, and other ghosts are found throughout the novel as they tie the past to the present and future. Likewise, Mam and Pop project the belief in spirituality through gris-gris bags, which contain objects of nature that are assumed to administer power for humans. In the novel, the spiritual connection between nature and man is prevalent through their African-based traditions."}
{"text":"The novel demonstrates the afterlife of slavery in America. Songs and story-telling play a role in building resilience. Singing to the unresting spirits at the end of the story, Kayla represents hope for the future."}
{"text":"Another theme is of family, for it offers differing insights into the roles of parenting. Though they care for Jojo and Kayla, Leonie and Michael are absent mother and father figures. They tend to dissociate themselves from their responsibilities through drug usage. Thus, Jojo looks to his Pop and Mam as the family's caretakers. Jojo also takes on the task of being Kayla's guardian, protecting her in any way he can."}
{"text":"Racial relations is also discussed in this novel through the family's interracial dynamics. Though Michael appears to love Leonie despite their differing skin colors, his family sternly disapproves of the life he leads. The character of Michael's father, Big Joseph, showcases the lingering tensions of white supremacy in the South. He protects Michael's cousin after killing Given, since the cousin was upholding Southern ideals of Black inferiority. In the same manner, Big Joseph rejects his own son, Michael, for defying this tradition with his bi-racial children."}
{"text":"Finally, the theme of water offers much significance in the novel. Water symbolizes the processes of nurturing and developing. Those with water, like River and Mam (who is referred to as the saltwater woman), are able to bloom. Meanwhile, those without water, like those in \"Parchman,\" are withering away without such subsistence, unable to find peace and stability. Even the setting in the Mississippi Delta may suggest the importance of water in the novel."}
{"text":"Reviewing the novel for \"The Washington Post\", Ron Charles compared it to George Saunders's \"Lincoln in the Bardo\" and Toni Morrison's \"Beloved\"; at NPR, Annalisa Quinn found it \"reminiscent of \"As I Lay Dying\" by William Faulkner."}
{"text":"\"Sing, Unburied, Sing\" was the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for fiction. This was her second time winning this award. Ward is the first woman and first person of color to receive this honor twice."}
{"text":"The novel was selected by \"Time\" magazine and \"The New York Times\" as one of the top ten novels of 2017. It is also acclaimed as one of the best novels of the year by the \"New Statesman\", the \"Financial Times\", and BBC, all of which are located in London."}
{"text":"Former U.S. President Barack Obama included the novel in a list of the best books he read in 2017."}
{"text":"It was ranked in Literary Hub as the second best book of the 2010s, behind only Claudia Rankine\u2019s \"\" (2014)."}
{"text":"The novel also won Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2018 and the Mark Twain American Voice In Literature Award in 2019."}
{"text":"Annie John, a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985, details the growth of a girl in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships, lesbianism, racism, clinical depression, poverty, education, and the struggle between medicine based on \"scientific fact\" and that based on \"native superstitious know-how\"."}
{"text":"Annie John is then moved to a higher class because of her intelligence. For this reason, Annie is drawn away from her best friend Gwen, while alienating herself from her mother and the other adults in her life. It later becomes clear that she also suffers from some kind of mental depression, which distances her from both her family and her friends. The book ends with her physically distancing herself away from all that she knows and loves by leaving home for nursing school in England."}
{"text":"The book's chapters were originally published separately in \"The New Yorker\", before being combined and published as the novel \"Annie John\", the stories connected by Kincaid's use of Annie John as the narrator."}
{"text":"Children growing apart from their parents while becoming adolescents is the major theme in the novel. Annie and her mother share common personalities, goals and even look exactly alike, though they grow apart through the narrative. Barbara Wiedemann writes that Kincaid's fiction is not specifically aimed at a young adult audience, but the readers will benefit from insight evident in Kincaid's description of coming of age."}
{"text":"\"Annie John\" has been noted to contain feminist views. Asked if the relationship between Annie and Gwen was meant to suggest \u201clesbian tendencies,\u201d Kincaid replied: \"No\u2026I think I am always surprised that people interpret it so literally.\" The relationship between Gwen and Annie is really a practicing relationship. It's about how things work. It's like learning to walk. Always there is the sense that they would go on to lead heterosexual lives. Whatever happened between them, homosexuality would not be a serious thing because it is just practicing\u201d (Vorda 94)."}
{"text":"In the story, the theme of colonization is conveyed. England has colonized Antigua, and has reconstructed its society. This is seen when the reader is introduced to Miss George and Miss Edward, teachers at Annie's school, who are both named after English kings. Antigua in return, strongly dislikes England for disposing of its native culture."}
{"text":"Water is consistently used throughout the novel to depict the separation between Annie John and her mother. Symbolic references to water (including the sea, rain, and other forms) illustrate Annie's development from childhood to maturity. Near the start of the novel, the reader learns that Annie has both a normal baby bottle and one shaped like a boat - and that is only the beginning of her water-connected choices in life."}
{"text":"Kincaid's writing form is not in the traditional paragraph form, but run-on sentences and paragraphs with little fragments. Jan Hall, a writer for Salem Press Master Plots, Fourth Edition book states in an article about \"Annie John\" that \u201cbecause the novel has no years, months, or dates the story has a sense of timelessness.\u201d"}
{"text":"Dear Martin, published in 2017 by Crown Publishing Group, is a young adult novel by Nic Stone. It is Stone's debut novel, written as a reaction to the murder of Jordan Davis. The book appeared as #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list."}
{"text":"Stone began writing the book after a series of racially-charge events, including the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old who was killed by man who shot several rounds into a car of teenagers over a dispute about loud rap music, and the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown. Stone was also inspired to write the book for her sons. Stone sold her book as a proposal, resulting in her writing and researching simultaneously over an eight-week period to develop a draft. Stone described the experience as \"excruciating\" and stated that she was not interested in repeating it."}
{"text":"\"Dear Martin\" has been published and translated in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, The Netherlands, UK, Turkey, and Romania."}
{"text":"\"Dear Martin\" follows Justyce McAllister, a high school student living in Atlanta and attending a predominantly white preparatory high school on a scholarship. Justyce is thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a white police officer. After the incident, Justyce attempts to make sense of life as a black teenager in the current political climate and begins writing letters to the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asking himself, \"What would Dr. King do if he were alive today?\"."}
{"text":"The book received a starred review from Booklist."}
{"text":"In February 2020, two years after it was first published, \"Dear Martin\" again hit the New York Times bestseller list, as the #1 Young Adult Paperback."}
{"text":"Stone wrote a sequel, \"Dear Justyce,\" which was published in October 2020. The book is about an incarcerated teen, Quan, who is on trial for murder charges. Quan first appears in \"Dear Martin\" as the cousin of Justyce's best friend. Stone was not planning on writing a sequel, but was encouraged by her publisher and decided to write a book about a \"black boy that everybody is afraid of.\""}
{"text":"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"}
{"text":"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book documents Jacobs's life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself and for her children. Jacobs contributed to the genre of slave narrative by using the techniques of sentimental novels \"to address race and gender issues.\" She explores the struggles and sexual abuse that female slaves faced as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and protect their children when their children might be sold away."}
{"text":"In the book, Jacobs addresses white Northern women who fail to comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution."}
{"text":"Jacobs composed \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\" after her escape to New York, while living and working at Idlewild, the home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis."}
{"text":"Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. When she was a child, her mistress taught her to read and write, skills that were extremely rare among slaves. At twelve years old, she fell into the hands of an abusive owner who harassed her sexually. When he threatened to sell her children, she hid in a tiny crawlspace under the roof of her grandmother's house. After staying there for seven years, spending much of her time reading the Bible and also newspapers, she finally managed to escape to New York in 1842."}
{"text":"When Jacobs started working on \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\" in 1853, many works by abolitionist and African American writers were already in print. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison had started the publication of his weekly \"The Liberator\"."}
{"text":"In 1845, Frederick Douglass had published his first autobiography, \"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself\", which became a bestseller and paved the way for subsequent slave narratives."}
{"text":"The white abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, published \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\" in 1852, artfully combining the genres of slave narratives and sentimental novels. Although a work of fiction, Stowe based her novel on several accounts by eyewitnesses."}
{"text":"However, the relationship between black and white abolitionist writers was not without problems. Garrison supplied a preface to Douglass' \"Narrative\" that would later be analyzed as latently racist, and the relationship between the two male abolitionists deteriorated when Garrison was less than supportive to the idea of Douglass starting his own newspaper. That Stowe's book became an instant bestseller was in part due to the fact that she shared her readers' racist mindset, explicitly stating that black people were intellectually inferior and modeling the character of her protagonist, Uncle Tom, accordingly. When Jacobs suggested to Stowe that Stowe transform her story into a book, Jacobs perceived Stowe's reaction as a racist insult, which she analyzed in a letter to her white friend Amy Post."}
{"text":"In the antebellum period, the Cult of True Womanhood was prevalent among upper and middle-class white women. This set of ideals, as described by Barbara Welter, asserted that all women possessed (or should possess) the virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Venetria K. Patton explains that Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson, who wrote \"Our Nig\", reconfigured the genres of slave narrative and sentimental novel, claiming the titles of \"woman and mother\" for black females, and suggesting that society's definition of womanhood was too narrow. They argued and \"remodeled\" Stowe's descriptions of black maternity."}
{"text":"They also showed that the institution of slavery made it impossible for African-American women to control their virtue, as they were subject to the social and economic power of men. Jacobs showed that slave women had a different experience of motherhood but had strong feelings as mothers despite the constraints of their position."}
{"text":"Jacobs was clearly aware of the womanly virtues, as she referred to them as a means to appeal to female abolitionists to spur them into action to help protect enslaved black women and their children. In the narrative, she explains life events that prevent Linda Brent from practicing these values, although she wants to. For example, as she cannot have a home of her own for her family, she cannot practice domestic virtues."}
{"text":"Linda Brent is Harriet Jacobs, the narrator and protagonist."}
{"text":"Aunt Martha is Molly Horniblow, Linda's maternal grandmother. After briefly talking of her earliest childhood, her parents and her brother, Jacobs begins her book with the history of her grandmother. At the end of the book, Jacobs relates the death of her grandmother in 1853, soon after Jacobs had obtained her legal freedom, using the very last sentence to mention the \"tender memories of my good old grandmother.\" Molly Horniblow obtained her freedom in 1828, when Jacobs was about 15 years old, because friends of hers bought her with the money she had earned by working at night."}
{"text":"William is John S. Jacobs, Linda's brother, to whom she is close."}
{"text":"Ellen is Louisa Matilda Jacobs, Linda's daughter."}
{"text":"Dr. Flint is Dr. James Norcom, Linda's master, enemy and would-be lover. J.\u00a0F.\u00a0Yellin, after researching his surviving private letters and notes, writes about his personality: \"Norcom was a loving and dominating husband and father. In his serious and sophisticated interest in medicine, his commitment as a physician, and his educated discourse, he appears unlike the villain Jacobs portrays. But his humorlessness, his egoism, his insistently controlling relationships with his wife and children ... suggest the portrait Jacobs draws. This impression is supported by ... his unforgiving fury against those he viewed as enemies. It is underscored by his admitted passionate responses to women.\""}
{"text":"Mrs. Flint is Mary \"Maria\" Norcom, Linda's mistress and Dr. Flint's wife."}
{"text":"Emily Flint is Mary Matilda Norcom, Dr. Flint's daughter and Linda's legal owner."}
{"text":"Mr. Sands is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, Linda's white sexual partner and the father of her children, Benny and Ellen."}
{"text":"The second Mrs. Bruce is Cornelia Grinnel Willis."}
{"text":"The other chapters are dedicated to special subjects: Chapter 3 describes the hiring out and selling of slaves on New Year's Day, chapter 8 is called \"What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North\", chapter 9 gives various example of cruel treatment of slaves, chapter 12 describes the narrator's experience of the anti-black violence in the wake of Nat Turner's Rebellion, and chapter 13 is called \"The Church And Slavery\"."}
{"text":"Both Harriet Jacobs and her brother John frustrate the threats of their master by simply choosing what was meant as a threat: When Dr. Norcom throws John into the jail, which regularly serves as the place to guard slaves that are to be sold, John sends a slave trader to his master telling him he wants to be sold. When Norcom tells Harriet to choose between becoming his concubine and going to the plantation, she chooses the latter, knowing that plantation slaves are even worse off than town slaves."}
{"text":"Harriet Jacobs also knows to fight back with words: On various occasions, she doesn't follow the pattern of submissive behavior that is expected of a slave, protesting when her master beats her and when he forbids her to marry the man she loves, and even telling him that his demand of a sexual relationship is against the law of God."}
{"text":"Jacobs's employer, N. P. Willis, was the founding editor of the \"Home Journal\". Some years before she started working on her book, he had published an anonymous story called \"The Night Funeral of a Slave\" about a Northerner who witnesses a funeral of an old slave which he interprets as a sign for the love between the master and his slaves. The story ends with the conclusion drawn by the northern narrator, \"that the negroes of the south are the happiest and most contented people on the face of the earth\". In 1849, that story was republished by Frederick Douglass, in order to criticize pro-slavery Northerners."}
{"text":"However, she is very critical regarding the religion of the slaveholders, stating \"there is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south.\" She describes \"the contemptuous manner in which the communion [was] administered to colored people\". She also tells of a Methodist class leader, who in civil life is the town constable, performing the \"Christian office\" - as Jacobs calls it in bitter irony - of whipping slaves for a fee of 50 cents. She also criticizes \"the buying and selling of slaves, by professed ministers of the gospel.\""}
{"text":"Jacobs's distinction between \"Christianity and religion at the south\" has a parallel in Frederick Douglass's \"Narrative\", where he distinguishes the \"slaveholding religion\" from \"Christianity proper\", between which he sees the \"widest, possible difference\", stating, \"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.\""}
{"text":"According to Yellin, \"Incidents\" has a \"radical feminist content.\" Yellin states that \"Incidents\" is linked to the then popular genre of the seduction novel. That genre, examples of which include \"Charlotte Temple\" (1791) and \"The Quadroons\", written in 1842 by M. Lydia Child, who would later become the editor of \"Incidents\", features the story of a virtuous, but helpless woman seduced by a man. Her failure to adhere to the standard of sexual behaviour set by the \"white partriarchy\", \"inevitably\" leads to her \"self-destruction and death\". Although Jacobs describes her sexual transgression (i.e. the liaison with Sawyer) in terms of guilt and sin, she also sees it as a \"mistaken tactic in the struggle for freedom\". Most important, the book does not end with self-destruction, but with liberty."}
{"text":"According to Yellin, \"a central pattern in \"Incidents\" shows white women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women\": When Jacobs goes into hiding, a white woman who is herself a slaveholder hides her in her own house for a month, and when she is threatened with recapture, her female employer's plan to rescue her involves entrusting her own baby to Jacobs."}
{"text":"Jacobs presents herself as struggling to build a home for herself and her children. \"This endorsement of domestic values links \"Incidents\" to what has been called 'woman's fiction'\", in which a heroine overcomes hardships by finding the necessary resources inside herself. But unlike \"woman's fiction\", \"\"Incidents\" is an attempt to move women to political action\", thus stepping out of the domestic sphere at that time commonly held to be the proper sphere for women and joining the public sphere."}
{"text":"Jacobs discusses \"the painful personal subject\" of her sexual history \"in order to politicize it, to insist that the forbidden topic of sexual abuse of slave women be included in public discussions of the slavery question.\" In telling of her daughter's acceptance of her sexual history, she \"shows black women overcoming the divisive sexual ideology of the white patriarchy\"."}
{"text":"The book was promoted via the abolitionist networks and was well received by the critics. Jacobs arranged for a publication in Great Britain, which appeared in the first months of 1862, soon followed by a pirated edition. \"\"Incidents\" was immediately acknowledged as a contribution to Afro-American letters.\""}
{"text":"The publication did not cause contempt as Jacobs had feared. On the contrary, Jacobs gained respect. Although she had used a pseudonym, in abolitionist circles she was regularly introduced with words like \"Mrs. Jacobs, the author of Linda\", thereby conceding her the honorific \"Mrs.\" which normally was reserved for married women. The \"London Daily News\" wrote in 1862, that Linda Brent was a true \"heroine\", giving an example \"of endurance and persistency in the struggle for liberty\" and \"moral rectitude\"."}
{"text":"\"Incidents\" \"may well have influenced\" \"Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted\", a 1892 novel by black author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, \"which in turn helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today.\""}
{"text":"Still, \"Incidents\" was not republished, and \"by the twentieth century both Jacobs and her book were forgotten\"."}
{"text":"The new interest in women and minority issues that came with the American civil rights movement also led to the rediscovery of \"Incidents\". The first new editions began to appear at the end of the 1960s."}
{"text":"Prior to Jean Fagan Yellin's research in the 1980s, the accepted academic opinion, voiced by such historians as John Blassingame, was that \"Incidents\" was a fictional novel written by Lydia Maria Child. However, Yellin found and used a variety of historical documents, including from the Amy Post papers at the University of Rochester, state and local historical societies, and the Horniblow and Norcom papers at the North Carolina state archives, to establish both that Harriet Jacobs was the true author of \"Incidents,\" and that the narrative was her autobiography, not a work of fiction. Her edition of \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\" was published in 1987 with the endorsement of Professor John Blassingame."}
{"text":"In 2004, Yellin published an exhaustive biography (394 pages) entitled \"Harriet Jacobs: A Life\"."}
{"text":"In a New York Times review of Yellin's 2004 biography, David S. Reynolds states that \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\" \"and \"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave\" are commonly viewed as the two most important slave narratives.\""}
{"text":"In the \"Acknowledgments\" of his best selling 2016 novel, \"The Underground Railroad (novel)\", Colson Whitehead mentions Jacobs: \"Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, obviously.\" The heroine of the novel, Cora, has to hide in a place in the attic of a house in Jacobs's native North Carolina, where like Jacobs she is not able to stand, but like her can observe the outside life through a hole that \"had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant\" (p. 185)."}
{"text":"In 2017 Jacobs was the subject of an episode of the Futility Closet Podcast, where her experience living in a crawlspace was compared with the wartime experience of Patrick Fowler."}
{"text":"According to a 2017 article in \"Forbes\" magazine, a 2013 translation of \"Incidents\" by Yuki Horikoshi became a bestseller in Japan."}
{"text":"Katherine McKittrick reveals how theories of geography and spatial freedom produce alternative understandings and possibilities within Black feminist thought. By centering geography in her analysis, McKittrick portrays the ways in which gendered-racial-sexual domination is spatially organized. McKittrick writes, \"Recognizing black women's knowledgeable positions as integral to physical, cartographic, and experiential geographies within and through dominant spatial models also creates an analytical space for black feminist geographies: black women's political, feminist, imaginary, and creative concerns that respatialize the geographic legacy of racism-sexism.\""}
{"text":"Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States. Three additional versions were published through 1867."}
{"text":"The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the \"degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America.\" Featuring an enslaved mixed-race woman named Currer and her daughters Althesa and Clotel, fathered by Thomas Jefferson, it is considered a tragic mulatto story. The women's relatively comfortable lives end after Jefferson's death. They confront many hardships, with the women taking heroic action to preserve their families."}
{"text":"The novel played with known 19th-century reports that Thomas Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and fathered several children with her. Of mixed race and described as nearly white, she was believed to be the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, the youngest of six children by her father John Wayles with his slave Betty Hemings. Members of the large Hemings family were among more than 100 slaves inherited by Martha and Thomas Jefferson after her father's death. Martha died when Jefferson was 40 and he never remarried."}
{"text":"As an escaped slave, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, William Wells Brown was at risk in the United States. While in England on a lecture tour in 1849, he decided to stay there with his two daughters after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, as he was at risk of being taken by slave catchers. He published \"Clotel\" in 1853 in London; it was the first novel published by an African American. In 1854 a British couple purchased freedom for Brown, and he returned with his daughters to the US."}
{"text":"The narrative of \"Clotel\" plays with history by relating the \"perilous antebellum adventures\" of a young mixed-race slave Currer and her two light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Because the mother is a slave, according to partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662, her daughters are born into slavery. The book includes \"several sub-plots\" related to other slaves, religion and anti-slavery. Currer, described as \"a bright mulatto\" (meaning light-skinned) gives birth to two \"near white\" daughters: Clotel and Althesa."}
{"text":"After the death of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters are sold as slaves."}
{"text":"Horatio Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife. They cannot legally marry under state laws against miscegenation."}
{"text":"Her mother Currer and sister Althesa remain \"in a slave gang.\" Currer is eventually purchased by Mr. Peck, a preacher. She is enslaved until she dies from yellow fever, shortly before Peck's daughter was preparing to emancipate her."}
{"text":"Althesa marries her white master, Henry Morton, a Northerner, by passing as a white woman. They have daughters Jane and Ellen, who are educated. Although supporting abolition, Morton fails to manumit Althesa and their daughters. After Althesa and Morton both die, their daughters are enslaved. Ellen commits suicide to escape sexual enslavement, and Jane dies in slavery from heartbreak."}
{"text":"Green and Clotel have a daughter Mary, also mixed race of course, and majority white. When Green becomes ambitious and involved in local politics, he abandons his relationship with Clotel and Mary. He marries \"a white woman who forces him to sell Clotel and enslave his child.\""}
{"text":"Mary is forced to work as a domestic slave for her father Horatio Green and his white wife. She arranges to trade places in prison with her lover, the slave George. He escapes to Canada. Sold to a slave trader, Mary is purchased by a French man who takes her to Europe. Ten years later, after the Frenchman's death, George and Mary reunite by chance in Dunkirk, France. The novel ends with their marriage."}
{"text":"The novel has been extensively studied in the late 20th and early 21st century. Kirkpatrick writes that \"Clotel\" demonstrates the \"pervasive, recurring victimization of black women under slavery. Even individuals of mixed-race status who attempt to pass as white nevertheless suffer horrifically.\" It exposes \"the insidious intersection of economic gain and political ambition\u2014represented by founding fathers such as Jefferson and Horatio Green.\" It is a \"scathing, sarcastic, comprehensive critique of slavery in the American South, race prejudice in the American North, and religious hypocrisy in the American notion as a whole.\" The novel and the title \"walk a precarious line between oral history, written history, and artistic license.\" Mitchell said that Brown emphasized romantic conventions, dramatic incident and a political view in his novel."}
{"text":"Recent scholars have also analyzed \"Clotel\" for its representations of gender and race. Sherrard-Johnson notes that Brown portrayed both the \"tragic central characters \" and the \"heroic figures\" as mulattoes with Angloid features, similar to his own appearance. She thinks he uses the cases of \"nearly white\" slaves to gain sympathy for his characters. She notes that he borrowed elements from the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child's plot in her short story, \"The Quadroons\" (1842). He also incorporated notable elements of recent events, such as the escape of the Crafts, and the freedom suit court case of Salome, an enslaved woman in Louisiana who claimed to be an immigrant born in Germany."}
{"text":"Martha Cutter notes that Brown portrayed his women characters generally as passive victims of slavery and as representations of True Women and the cult of domesticity, which were emphasized at the time for women. They are not portrayed as wanting or seeking freedom, but as existing through love and suffering. Cutter asks, if Mary could free George, why did she not free herself? Although Brown published three later versions of \"Clotel\", he did not seriously change this characterization of the African-American women. Slave women such as Ellen Craft were known to have escaped slavery, but Brown did not portray such women fully achieving freedom."}
{"text":"Mitchell, in contrast, believes that Brown portrays his women as acting heroically: she notes that Clotel escapes and goes back to Virginia to rescue her daughter, and more than one escape is described. She thinks he emphasizes adventure for the sake of character development. Even after heroic action, Brown's women are subject to the suffering of slavery. He emphasizes its evil of illegitimacy, and the arbitrary breakup of families."}
{"text":"In addition to being the first novel published by an African American, \"Clotel\" became a model that influenced many other nineteenth-century African-American writers. It is the first instance of an African-American writer \"to dramatize the underlying hypocrisy of democratic principles in the face of African American slavery.\""}
{"text":"Through \"Clotel\", Brown introduces into African-American literature the \"tragic mulatto\" character. Such characters, representing the historical reality of hundreds of thousands of mixed-race people, many of them slaves, were further developed by \"Webb, Wilson, Chesnutt, Johnson, and other novelists\", writing primarily after the American Civil War."}
{"text":"Brown published three variations of \"Clotel\" in the 1860s, but did not markedly change his portrayal of the African-American women characters."}
{"text":"According to Brown in its preface, he wrote \"Clotel\" as a polemic narrative against slavery, written for a British audience:"}
{"text":"It is also considered a propagandistic narrative, in that Brown leveraged \"sentimentality, melodrama, contrived plots, [and] newspaper articles\" as devices \"to damage the 'peculiar institution' of slavery.\""}
{"text":"Chapters predominantly open \"with an epigraph underscoring the romance\u2019s urgent message: 'chattel slavery in America undermines the entire social condition of man.'\""}
{"text":"\"Clotel\" is told through the use of a \"third-person limited omniscient narrator.\" The narrator is \"morally didactic and consistently ironic.\" The narrative is fragmented, in that it \"combines fact, fiction, and external literary sources.\" It presents the reader with a structure that is episodic and is informed by \"legends, myths, music, and concrete eye-witness accounts of the fugitive slaves themselves.\" It also \"draws on antislavery lectures and techniques,\" such as \"abolitionist verse and fiction, newspaper stories and ads, legislative reports, public addresses, private letters, and personal anecdotes.\""}
{"text":"An American Marriage is a novel by the American author Tayari Jones. It is her fourth novel and was published by Algonquin Books on February 6, 2018. In February 2018, the novel was chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. The novel also won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction."}
{"text":"The novel focuses on the marriage of a middle-class African-American couple, Celestial and Roy, who live in Atlanta, Georgia. Their lives are torn apart when Roy is wrongfully convicted of a rape he did not commit."}
{"text":"In an interview with \"The Paris Review\" Jones revealed that she initially wrote the book solely from Celestial's point of view and decided to add multiple points of view after her initial readers reacted negatively to Celestial."}
{"text":"Celestial has, in the meantime, fallen in love with her childhood best friend, Andre. The night she learns that Roy is about to be set free, Andre proposes. Despite her guilt, Celestial decides to divorce Roy and marry Andre. Though the rest of her family accept her choice, the news causes a rift between Celestial and her father."}
{"text":"Roy is released from prison early and is collected by his father, Roy Sr. Aware that Celestial plans to have Andre pick him up, Roy decides to leave for Atlanta just as Andre is leaving to collect him, ensuring that he will have time to spend alone with Celestial. Before he leaves, Roy runs into a former classmate of his, Davina, who invites him over for dinner. The two end up having sex which Roy feels is meaningful. He nevertheless decides to leave for Atlanta to pursue a relationship with his wife."}
{"text":"In the epilogue Roy and Celestial exchange letters. Celestial informs Roy that though she and Andre are having a baby they have no plans to marry and Roy tells Celestial that he has reunited with Davina and the two plan to marry."}
{"text":"The novel was widely praised upon its release. \"The New York Times\" praised it as a \"wise and compassionate\" novel. \"The Globe and Mail\" called the novel \"sensational\". The Washington Post commended Jones for her \"daring creative choices\" and \"tender patience\". \"The Guardian\" described the book as, \"an immensely readable novel, packed with ideas and emotion\". \"The Atlantic\" positively noted that, \"with \"An American Marriage\", Jones joins this conversation in a quietly powerful way. Her writing illuminates the bits and pieces of a marriage: those almost imperceptible moments that make it, break it, and forcefully tear it apart.\""}
{"text":"Linden Hills is a novel written by Gloria Naylor, originally published in 1985. Naylor bases her allegory on Dante's Inferno. The narrative is written from a third-person omniscient perspective, detailing different characters based on different traits that correspond with the different rings of Dante's interpretation of Hell. The novel is a revision of Naylor's Yale master\u2019s thesis."}
{"text":"Naylor begins her narrative by detailing the family history of Luther Nedeed, real estate purveyor of the Linden Hills neighborhood. Naylor exposes the American dream as nightmare, through the lens of race and class, by unraveling the dark secrets of Tupelo Drive."}
{"text":"Critical reception has been positive. \"The New York Times\" wrote a mostly favorable review for the work, stating \"Its flaws notwithstanding, the novel's ominous atmosphere and inspired set pieces - such as the minister's drunken fundamentalist sermon before an incredulous Hills congregation - make it a fascinating departure for Miss Naylor, as well as a provocative, iconoclastic novel about a seldom-addressed subject.\" \"Publishers Weekly\" was more critical, stating that the \"narrative seems constructed and contrived rather than animated by the inner energy that distinguished Naylor's previous work. The novel as a whole is cold and preachy.\""}
{"text":"The Hate U Give is a 2017 young adult novel by Angie Thomas. It is Thomas's debut novel, expanded from a short story she wrote in college in reaction to the police shooting of Oscar Grant. The book is narrated by Starr Carter, a 16-year-old black girl from a poor neighborhood who attends an elite private school in a predominantly white, affluent part of the city. Starr becomes entangled in a national news story after she witnesses a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil. She speaks up about the shooting in increasingly public ways, and social tensions culminate in a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the police officer for the shooting."}
{"text":"The book was adapted into a film by Fox 2000 in October\u00a02018, which received positive reviews. The novel was also adapted into an audiobook, won several awards and praise for its narrator, Bahni Turpin."}
{"text":"Unsure whether publishers would be interested in the Black Lives Matter-inspired material, Thomas reached out to literary agent Brooks Sherman on Twitter in June\u00a02015 to ask for advice. In February\u00a02016, HarperCollins' imprint Balzer\u00a0+\u00a0Bray bought the rights to the novel in an auction, outbidding 13 other publishing houses, and signed a two-book deal with Thomas. Fox\u00a02000 optioned the film rights the following month."}
{"text":"The 464-page book was published on February\u00a028, 2017, when the industry was attempting to address a decade-long stagnation in the number of children's books by African-American authors. Since its publication, Thomas has become an example of attempts by publishers to publish more young adult African-American novelists."}
{"text":"Starr Carter is a 16-year-old black girl, who lives in the fictional mostly poor black neighborhood of Garden Heights, but attends an affluent predominantly white private school, Williamson Prep. After a shooting breaks up a party Starr is attending, she is driven home by her childhood best friend and sometimes crush Khalil. They are stopped by a white police officer. The officer instructs Khalil, who is black, to exit the car; while outside the car, Khalil leans into the driver-side window to check in on Starr. The officer then shoots Khalil three times, killing him."}
{"text":"Starr agrees to an interview with police about the shooting after being encouraged by her Uncle Carlos, who is also a detective. Carlos was a father figure to Starr when her father, Maverick, spent three years in prison for gang activity. Following his release, Maverick left the gang and became the owner of the Garden Heights grocery store where Starr and her older half-brother Seven work. Maverick was only allowed to leave his gang, the King Lords, because he confessed to a crime to protect gang-leader King. Widely feared in the neighborhood, King now lives with Seven's mother, Seven's half-sister Kenya, who is friends with Starr, and Kenya's little sister, Lyric."}
{"text":"Khalil's death becomes a national news story. The media portrays Khalil as a gang banger and drug dealer, while portraying the white officer who killed him more favorably. Starr's identity as the witness is initially kept secret from everyone outside Starr's family, including her younger brother Sekani. Keeping the secret from her white boyfriend Chris and her best friends Hailey Grant and Maya Yang \u2013 who all attend Williamson Prep \u2013 weighs on Starr, as does her need to keep her Williamson and Garden Heights personalities separate. Starr's struggles with her identity are further complicated after her mother gets a higher-paying job and the family moves out of Garden Heights."}
{"text":"After a grand jury fails to indict the white officer, Garden Heights erupts into both peaceful protests and riots. The failure of the criminal justice system to hold the officer accountable pushes Starr to take an increasingly public role, first giving a television interview and then speaking out during the protests, which are met by police in riot gear. Her increasing identification with the people of Garden Heights causes tension with Starr's friends, especially with her boyfriend Chris. But by the end of the novel, Starr and Maya have started standing up to Hailey's racist comments while Chris offers support to Starr."}
{"text":"The climax of the novel occurs during the riot following the grand jury decision. Starr, Chris, Seven, and DeVante \u2013 whom Maverick helped leave the King Lords \u2013 successfully defend Maverick's store from King. The neighborhood stands up to King and as a result of testimony by DeVante, King is arrested and expected to be imprisoned for a lengthy sentence. Starr promises to keep Khalil's memory alive and to continue her advocacy against injustice."}
{"text":"The book also earned starred reviews from multiple review journals. \"Kirkus\", which nominated the book for its Kirkus Prize, praised both its writing and timelines: \"With smooth but powerful prose ... This story is necessary. This story is important.\" Young adult literature expert Michael Cart, writing in \"Booklist\", also praised Thomas's writing as Starr: \"Beautifully written in Starr's authentic first-person voice, this is a marvel of verisimilitude.\" While praising the overall book in a starred review, \"School Library Journal\"s Mahnaz Dar criticized the writing of several characters as \"slightly uneven\". The \"Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books\", \"Horn Book Magazine\", and \"VOYA\" also gave the book their equivalents of starred reviews."}
{"text":"\"The Hate U Give\" has received the following awards and accolades:"}
{"text":"The American Library Association listed the book as one of the ten most-challenged books of 2017 (), 2018 (), and 2020 (10) \"because it was considered 'pervasively vulgar,'\" contained \"drug use, profanity, and offensive language,\" as well as sexual references, and \"was thought to promote an anti-police message.\""}
{"text":"In July\u00a02018, a South Carolina police union raised objections to the inclusion of the book, as well as the similarly themed \"All American Boys\" by Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds, in the summer reading list for ninth-grade students of Wando High School. A representative of the police lodge described the inclusion of the books as \"almost indoctrination of distrust of police\" and asserted that \"we've got to put a stop to that.\" The books remained on the list and Wando's principal was later recognized by the state school library association for her defense of the challenged books."}
{"text":"The book was removed from the school libraries of the Katy Independent School District due to its explicit language. Thomas responded to these challenges by defending the book's message and saying that it is a spur for conversation."}
{"text":"The Water Dancer is the debut novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published on September 24, 2019, by One World, an imprint of Random House. It is a surrealist story set in the pre\u2013Civil War South, concerning a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses photographic memory, but who cannot remember his mother, and is able to transport people over long distances by using a power known as \"conduction\" which can fold the Earth like fabric and allows him to travel across large areas via waterways."}
{"text":"The novel debuted at number one on \"The New York Times\" fiction best-seller list and was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club."}
{"text":"On October 13, 2019, the novel debuted at number one on \"The New York Times\" Hardcover Fiction best-sellers list and at number one on the Combined Print & E-Book Fiction best-sellers list."}
{"text":"The novel was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the first book for the revival of her Oprah's Book Club on Apple TV+. She called it \"one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. Right up there in the Top 5.\""}
{"text":"At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative \"Positive\" rating based on 41 reviews: 13 \"Rave\" reviews, 23 \"Positive\" reviews, 3 \"Mixed\" reviews, and 2 \"Pan\" reviews."}
{"text":"\"Publishers Weekly\" gave the novel a rave review, writing, \"In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation's most important writers, tackling one of America's oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed.\""}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" gave the novel a favorable review, but felt it was \"less intensely realized\" than Colson Whitehead's \"The Underground Railroad\" (2015)."}
{"text":"Dwight Garner of \"The New York Times\" gave the novel a positive review, calling it \"a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.\""}
{"text":"David Fear of \"Rolling Stone\" gave the novel a rave review, saying it exceeded expectations for a debut novel and writing, \"What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. [...] There\u2019s an urgency to his remembrance of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes \"The Water Dancer\" feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy.\""}
{"text":"Constance Grady of \"Vox\" praised the \"clarity of Coates's ideas and the poetry of his language\" but largely panned the novel as a \"mess\" with monotonous characters and lacking a strong plot development to make up for it. She criticized the movement between the plot-driven and allegorical storytelling modes as \"whiplash-inducing\"."}
{"text":"The Kenyatta series is a four-volume urban fiction series by American author Donald Goines under the pseudonym of Al C. Clark. Goines released the books under a pseudonym on the request of his publisher, who wanted to avoid flooding the market with too many books under Goines's name and potentially undermining sales as well as to differentiate the books from Goines's \"grittier\" urban fiction novels."}
{"text":"The books cover the actions of a man by the name of Kenyatta, named after Jomo Kenyatta, that leads a group of militant blacks similar to the Black Panther Party. The series comprises four books, \"Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta's Escape\", and \"Kenyatta's Last Hit\". Goines released the first book in June 1974 through Holloway House, with the final book being published posthumously in November of the same year."}
{"text":"The \"Kenyatta\" series deals with several themes such as drug usage and the idea of morality. The book also dealt with the idea of the exploitation of Black sex trade workers by white financiers as well as with the idea of African and African-American \"cultural and political nationalism behind bars\". In addition to Kenyatta seeking revenge against white police officers and financiers that he believes have wronged his people, the books also deal with the theme of black on black crime and the possible futility of one man attempting to clean up the ghettos in the absence of state or local government assistance."}
{"text":"In his book \"Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines\", Eddie B. Allen, Jr described the series as \"symbolizing [Goines's] desire for victory\" and \"represented the strength and fearless determination that he lacked\". Allen expressed disappointment over Kenyatta's death, as he saw the character as a representation of Goines's \"desire to overcome his addiction to drugs\" and because it \"suggests that good can never defeat the larger societal evils that afflict our black communities.\""}
{"text":"Film rights to the \"Kenyatta\" series were purchased by \"Picture Perfect Films\", with Kenneth McGriff intending to release all four books as a series of feature-length films. The first film, \"Crime Partners\" was released in 2003. The film starred Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, and Ja Rule, with Clifton Powell playing the character of Kenyatta. The film was directed by J. Jesses Smith, with McGriff producing. Producer Irv Gotti funded and marketed \"Crime Partner's\" soundtrack, with part of the funding being seized by the Federal government. Federal agents claimed that the soundtrack was one of several avenues used by Murder Inc. and Gotti to launder drug money."}
{"text":"The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a 2016 novel by American playwright and author Kia Corthron. It won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize."}
{"text":"The novel chronicles the lives and interactions of two sets of brothers: Eliot and Dwight in Maryland, and B.J. and Randall in Alabama. It begins in 1941, jumps to the late 1950s, and concludes with the climactic events in 1983, followed by an epilogue in 2010."}
{"text":"Corthron stated in a 2016 interview that she was inspired to begin the novel with the climactic event and drafted the novel in longhand. Upon starting the novel in 2010, she intended to have only one protagonist, but Corthron \"realized [she] also wanted to know the story behind the other key person involved in the event ... and at last it became a book about brothers.\" Corthron, then known for her work as a playwright, said before the novel was published \"[the idea] was just so huge I felt that this just couldn't fit into [a play,] a two-hour experience. Not necessarily more important, but just bigger.\""}
{"text":"The novel was composed mainly in chronological order and Corthron \"obsessively wrote [the draft] all the time,\" as fast as a hundred pages per month, noting she completed three drafts before showing it to anyone else. She composed parts of the novel at numerous writers' retreats and workshops."}
{"text":"The length of \"The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter\" caused several publishers to pass on the novel or suggest that it either receive major cuts or be broken into a trilogy; Corthron persisted until Seven Stories Press finally accepted the manuscript in September 2014. The original editor of the book at Seven Stories had resisted its publication, and Corthron believes the advocacy of another Seven Stories author, who brought the book to the primary editor at Seven Stories, was critical to its eventual publication. Corthron would cut 400 pages of the 1,200-page manuscript for final publication."}
{"text":"Corthron read from the proof galleys of her novel in 2015 at an artist's residency and a fellow writer in residency, Cathy Davidson, was immediately reminded of \"Faulkner. Morrison. Ismael Reed. I cannot wait to read this novel. [...] Breathtaking.\""}
{"text":"\"The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter\" won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for best first novel."}
{"text":"Jazz is a 1992 historical novel by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison. The majority of the narrative takes place in Harlem during the 1920s; however, as the pasts of the various characters are explored, the narrative extends back to the mid-19th-century American South."}
{"text":"The novel forms the second part of Morrison's Dantesque trilogy on African-American history, beginning with \"Beloved\" (1987) and ending with \"Paradise\" (1997)."}
{"text":"The novel deliberately mirrors the music of its title, with various characters \"improvising\" solo compositions that fit together to create a whole work. The tone of the novel also shifts with these compositions, from bluesy laments to up beat, sensual ragtime. The novel also utilizes the call-and-response style of jazz music, allowing the characters to explore the same events from different perspectives."}
{"text":"This book also features \"untrustworthy narrators\" whose emotions and perspective colour the story. Narration switches every so often to the viewpoint of various characters, inanimate objects, and even concepts. The book's final narrator is widely believed to be Morrison or perhaps the book itself."}
{"text":"Jazz was Morrison\u2019s most recently published work when she was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. In the novel, \"Morrison uses a device which is akin to the way jazz itself is played\u2026\u00a0the result is a richly complex, sensuously conveyed image of the events, the characters and moods.\""}
{"text":"To Baraka, \"Blues People\" represented \"everything [he] had carried for years, what [he] had to say, and [himself]\". The book is deeply personal and chronicles what brought him to believe that blues was a personal history of his people in the United States. The resonance and desperation of this type of music is what compelled Baraka to learn about the history of blues music. He learned through his studies that the \"Africanisms\" is directly related to American culture, rather than being solely related to Black people. Baraka dedicates the book \"to my parents ... the first Negroes I ever met\"."}
{"text":"The 1999 reprint begins with a reminiscence by the author, then aged 65, titled \"\"Blues People\": Looking Both Ways\", in which he credits the poet and English teacher Sterling Brown with having inspired both him and his contemporary A. B. Spellman. Baraka does not here discuss the impact his book has had."}
{"text":"The original text is divided into twelve chapters, summarized below."}
{"text":"Baraka opens the book by arguing that Africans suffered in America not only because they were slaves, but because American customs were completely foreign to them. He argues that slavery itself was not unnatural or alien to the African people, as slavery had long before existed in the tribes of West Africa. Some forms of West African slavery even resembled the plantation system in America. He then discusses a brief history of slavery, inside and outside the United States. He argues that unlike the slaves of Babylon, Israel, Assyria, Rome, and Greece, American slaves were not even considered human."}
{"text":"Baraka then further addresses his previous assertion that African slaves suffered in the New World because of the alien environment around them. For example, the language and dialect of colonial English had no resemblance to the African dialects. However, the biggest difference that set the African people aside was the difference in skin color. Even if the African slaves were freed, they would always remain apart and be seen as ex-slaves rather than as freed individuals. Colonial America was an alien land in which the African people could not assimilate because of the difference in culture and because they were seen as less than human."}
{"text":"Baraka stresses a point made by Melville Herskovits, the anthropologist responsible for establishing African and African-American studies in academia, which suggests that value is relative or that \"reference determines value\". Although Baraka is not justifying the white supremacist views of the West, he does create a space to better understand the belief that one can be more evolved than a people from whom one differs very much. Likewise the author does not present the African system of belief in supernatural predetermination as better but speaks of how an awful violence is done against these people ideologically, by forcing them into a world that believes itself to be the sole judge of the ways in which proper existence must occur."}
{"text":"In chapter 2, \"The Negro as Property\", Baraka focuses on the journey from the African to the African American. He breaks down the process of the African's acculturation to show its complex form. Baraka begins with the initial introduction to life in America. He compares the African's immigrant experience to that of the Italian and Irish. He says the Italian and Irish came \"from their first ghetto existences into the promise and respectability of this brave New World\" (p.\u00a012). Africans, on the other hand, came to this new world against their will. There was no promise or respectability in America for them, only force and abrupt change, and this defines the evolution of African-American culture."}
{"text":"\"African Slaves \/ American Slaves: Their Music\"."}
{"text":"Jazz is recognized as beginning around the turn of the 20th century, but is actually much older. Most people believe that its existence derived from African slavery, but it has native African-American roots. Blues music gave birth to Jazz, and both genres of music stem from the work songs of the first generation of African slaves in America."}
{"text":"Storytelling was the primary means of education within the slave community, and folk tales were a popular and useful means of passing down wisdom, virtues, and so on from the elders to the youth. These folk tales also became integrated into their music and American culture, and later began to appear in the lyrics of blues songs."}
{"text":"Expression of oneself, emotions, and beliefs was the purpose of the African work song. Instruments, dancing, culture, religion, and emotion were blended together to form this representative form of music. Adaptation, interpretation, and improvisation lay at the core of this American Negro music. The nature of slavery dictated the way African culture could be adapted and evolved. For example, drums were forbidden by many slave owners, for fear of its communicative ability to rally the spirits of the enslaved, and lead to aggression or rebellion. As a result, slaves used other percussive objects to create similar beats and tones."}
{"text":"As the music derived from their slave\/field culture, shouts and hollers were incorporated into their work songs, and were later represented through an instrumental imitation of blues and jazz music. From these origins, Jones declares, \"the notable fact is that the only so-called popular music in this country of any real value is of African derivation.\""}
{"text":"Christianity was adopted by the Negro people before the efforts of missionaries and evangelists. The North American Negroes were not even allowed to practice or talk about their own religion that their parents taught them. Specifically, in the south, slaves were sometimes beaten or killed when they talked about conjuring up spirits or the devil. Negroes also held a high reverence to the gods of their conquerors. Since their masters ruled over their everyday lives, Negroes acknowledge that the conqueror's gods must be more powerful than the gods they were taught to worship through discreet traditions."}
{"text":"\"The movement, the growing feeling that developed among Negroes, was led and fattened by the growing black middle class\"."}
{"text":"\"Stranger in the Village\" is an essay by African-American novelist James Baldwin about his experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland, after he nearly suffered a breakdown. The essay was originally published in \"Harper's Magazine\", October 1953, and later in his 1955 collection, \"Notes of a Native Son\"."}
{"text":"In the summer of 1951, Baldwin almost suffered a breakdown, for which his partner, Lucien Happersberger, took him to an established Swiss health-resort in the Valais Alps, known as Leukerbad. Baldwin declares that, while he is a stranger in the village of Leukerbad, he also feels like a stranger in the village of the United States of America as an African American."}
{"text":"The essay is an account of Baldwin's experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland. Residents of Leukerbad were fascinated by Baldwin's blackness; according to Baldwin they had never seen a black man before. The village is almost four hours from Milan Italy. Because it is located in Swiss alps, it is extremely isolated. Baldwin being an African American is the only Black person the villagers have ever seen thus making him a stranger in the village. Baldwin was a stranger in Leukerbad, the Swiss village, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history."}
{"text":"Baldwin further goes on to explain the relationship between American and European history, by explicitly pointing out that American history encompasses the history of the Negro, while European history lacks the African-American dimension. Baldwin observes that in America the Negro is \u201can inescapable part of the general social fabric\u201d and that \u201cAmericans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro.\u201d"}
{"text":"Baldwin argues that white Americans try to retain a separation between their history and black history despite the interdependence between the two. It is impossible for Americans to become European again \u201crecovering the European innocence\u201d through the neglect of the American Negro; the American Negro is a part of America permanently pressed and carved into an undeniable history."}
{"text":"The final sentence in his essay articulates a defiant claim by Baldwin and an understanding that the villagers' and white Americans' need to reach, losing thereby what Baldwin describes as \"the jewel\" of the white man's naivete - in other words, white Americans' willful desire to ignore white privilege and the effects of centuries of racism and systemic discrimination against Black Americans: \"This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.\" Therefore, as Baldwin put it, \u201cpeople are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.\u201d"}
{"text":"Baldwin appears to be telling the story of his experiences in that tiny Swiss village. He uses the story as a metaphor for the history of race relations in the United States, describing the power discrepancy between whites of European background and African Americans who were forcibly brought to the US as slaves."}
{"text":"Baldwin speaks of racism in the United States and in Leukerbad, Switzerland, drawing parallels between the two. This essay is autobiographical in nature, as Baldwin speaks of his own experiences. \"Stranger in The Village\", in many forms, is a protest against America for its treatment of African Americans, putting its racism on full display. In the essay, Baldwin raises questions of his own identity and how he fits into society in both the United States and in Leukerbad, where the family of his lover, Lucien Happersberger, had a chalet in a village up in the mountains."}
{"text":"The legacy of \"Stranger In the Village\" is tied to the legacy and reception of the book in which it is featured, \"Notes of a Native Son\". The book is widely regarded as a classic of the black autobiographical genre. The Modern Library placed it at number 19 on its list of the 100 best 20th-century nonfiction books. Since Baldwin's passing on December 1, 1987, his writings have been published worldwide and are still known as essential emblems of the American canon."}
{"text":"Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America is a 2005 book by Keith Boykin."}
{"text":"This book of essays analyzes the validity of the down low phenomenon, first publicized by J. L. King in his book \"On the Down Low\". It covers multiple discussions about gay sexuality, the African-American community, homophobia, and the spread of HIV."}
{"text":"Boykin distances himself from King's conclusions, accusing him of making a name for himself by spreading misinformation. He also stresses that not only African-American men who have sex with men are \"on the down low\". He names two Caucasians, Jim McGreevey and Ed Schrock, as examples of non-blacks technically \"on the down low\"."}
{"text":"He pinpoints how an article in \"The New York Times\" stating that a large number of black, gay men has been twisted to suggest that there are many men on the down low purposely infecting heterosexual, African-American women. Finally, he argues that only when more African-American men and women are openly gay in the media spotlight, this will diminish homophobia in black communities or disprove that homosexuality is a predominantly white (or at least non-black) phenomenon."}
{"text":"\"The Lesson\" is a short story by Toni Cade Bambara (1938\u20131995). It was first published in 1972."}
{"text":"This story also emphasizes that individuals who are segregated to certain environments should not be condescended to, as Miss Moore, the educated outsider, creates resistance with her patronizing."}
{"text":"The Man Who Was Almost a Man"}
{"text":"\"The Man Who Was Almost a Man\", also known as \"Almos' a Man\", is a short story by Richard Wright. It was published in 1961 as part of Wright's compilation \"Eight Men\". The story centers on Dave, a young African-American farm worker who is struggling to declare his identity in the atmosphere of the rural South. The story was adapted into a 1976 film starring LeVar Burton."}
{"text":"The story follows Dave Saunders, a seventeen-year-old kid desperate to prove his manhood. After being teased, babied, and downright \"disrespected\", our young hero decides that the only way he can make things right is by buying a gun. (Not the smartest move, as it turns out.) One dead mule, fifty dollars of debt, and an angry boss later, Dave is challenged to finally prove that he's a man once and for all."}
{"text":"By sunset Jenny's body is found and Dave is questioned by both his parents and Mr. Hawkins about what happened. Dave lies about the incident stating that something was wrong with Jenny causing her to fall on the point of the plow. His mother knows this is a lie and insist Dave tell the truth. In tears, Dave confesses, but lies yet again when asked what he has done with the gun. Mr. Hawkins tells Dave that although it was an accident he will pay two dollars a month until he has paid fifty dollars to replace the mule."}
{"text":"That night Dave feels annoyed at having to pay back Mr. Hawkins for the next two years, and even more annoyed with the fact that people view him as a child more now than ever before. He decides to leave his house and retrieve the gun in which he had buried, not thrown in a river like he claimed. He forces himself to fire the gun with his eyes open until he empties it. In the distance, Dave hears a train, which he approaches and hops in the hopes that this will at last prove he is indeed a man."}
{"text":"\"Girl\" is a short story written by Jamaica Kincaid that was included in \"At the Bottom of the River\" (1983). It appeared in the June 26, 1978 issue of \"The New Yorker\"."}
{"text":"The story is a to-do list and a how-to-do list containing one sentence of a 650 word dialogue. It features what the girl hears from her mother. The story is mostly told in the second person. The girl hears her mother's instructions and the behavior her mother is trying to instill in her. It is apparent that the mother is trying to give the girl some sort of advice and prescribing the way she should go about her life and daily tasks. One may infer that her mother probably got this language from someone in her past and it was most likely the way her mother spoke to her when she was a young girl, so that's all she's ever known."}
{"text":"During the story, her mother's voice sounds somewhat condescending and critical when speaking, suggesting that the girl is likely to become a \"slut.\" For example, in the short story, the mother states, \"on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.\" Throughout the piece the mother tries to pass down certain beliefs from her culture to her daughter. The mother constantly reminds her daughter of how to become the \"perfect\" woman in order to fit into the society that they live in. Also, the chores and behaviors that the mother makes the daughter inhabit are directly related to how women's duties should relate to a man's."}
{"text":"Like most of Kincaid's piece of writing, \"Girl\" is based on her own relationship between her and her mother while growing up. Jamaica Kincaid has also revealed in interviews that the setting of this short story takes place in Antigua."}
{"text":"The theme for \"Girl\" is mother-daughter dispute. In this story, the mother goes on and on teaching the daughter how to be the perfect woman in society. As the story goes on, the mother\u2019s directions get more demanding."}
{"text":"Difficult Women is a 2017 short story collection by Roxane Gay."}
{"text":"In \"Vogue\", Julia Fesenthal characterized \"Difficult Women\" as \"a misogynist's taxonomy of the opposite sex. On the narrator's short list: loose women, frigid women, crazy women, mothers, and, finally, dead girls,\" depicted in stories \"woven through with strands of magical realism.\""}
{"text":"Gay has described being challenged by publishers in the development of the collection owing to the difficult material the book covers. Speaking at the \"Los Angeles Times\" Festival of Books, Gay recounted, \"Editors said, 'we love [\"Difficult Women\"] but it makes me want to kill myself.\""}
{"text":"Grove Press published the 272-page collection on January 3, 2017."}
{"text":"\"Difficult Women\" received favorable reviews from critics. Reviewing the collection in \"The Washington Post\", Megan Mayhew Bergman said Gay's \"real gift to readers in \"Difficult Women\" is her ability to marry her well-known intellectual concerns with good storytelling.\" In \"USA Today\", Jaleesa M. Jones gave \"Difficult Women\" four (of four) stars, noting Gay's \"deft touch with how ... intersecting identities mold and shape women\u2019s experiences.\""}
{"text":"Life Is Not a Fairy Tale is a book describing the life of \"American Idol\" (season 3) winner Fantasia Barrino, and her rise to national prominence. The book later became a television movie shown on Lifetime."}
{"text":"\"Life Is Not a Fairy Tale\" by Fantasia."}
{"text":"In her autobiography \"Life Is Not a Fairy Tale\", a \"New York Times\" bestseller, Fantasia tells of her rise from high-school dropout to music star."}
{"text":"Life Is Not A Fairy Tale: The Fantasia Barrino Story is a 2006 American biographical film directed by Debbie Allen, loosely based on the life of American singer Fantasia Barrino. The film was adapted from the book \"Life Is Not A Fairy Tale\" written by Fantasia."}
{"text":"In this Lifetime original movie, director Debbie Allen gives viewers a first hand look at the struggles Fantasia faced before\/during her rise to fame. The movie begins with Fantasia's humble beginnings, growing up in a close knit God-fearing family that faced its own personal demons of struggling with their dreams. Fantasia faces problems with her self-esteem, sexual abuse, teen pregnancy and her faith as she fights to overcome her mistakes at a young age. This movie depicted from her best selling biopic of the same name, provides an emotional example of what you can achieve when believing in yourself."}
{"text":"The movie premiered on Saturday, August 19, 2006 at 9:00 PM EST. It was Lifetime's second most watched movie in its 22-year history, with more than nineteen million viewers tuning in during the August 19\u201320 weekend. The movie was ranked the number one basic cable movie premiere in 2006 among women ages 18\u201349. Weekend online traffic to Lifetimetv.com rose by more than seventy percent during that weekend."}
{"text":"In 2007, the movie and its actors including Fantasia, Loretta Devine and Kadeem Hardison were nominated for 4 NAACP Image Awards. Kadeem Hardison won his award. It was also nominated for a 2007 Teen Choice Award for Choice TV: Movie."}
{"text":"Although a soundtrack was never released for the film, many songs were performed throughout the film. The following track listing are the songs that are performed in order throughout the film."}
{"text":"Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins is a work of critical theory that discusses the way that race, class and gender intersect to affect the lives of African American men and women in many different ways, but with similar results. The book explores the way that new forms of racism can work to oppress black people, while filling them with messages of liberation."}
{"text":"\"Black Sexual Politics\" also examines the way a narrow sexual politics based on American ideas\/ideals of masculinity, femininity and the appropriate expression of sexuality work to repress gay and hetero, male and female. Collins' work also proposes a liberatory politics for black Americans, centered on honest dialogue about the way stereotypical imagery and limiting racist and sexist ideology have harmed African Americans in the past, and how African Americans might progress beyond these ideas and their manifestations to become active change agents in their own communities."}
{"text":"The book starts from the premise that in order to achieve a more progressive black political agenda, African Americans need to look critically at the way race, class and gender intersect in their lives to create different responses. Looking at the black community as a monolith may prevent us from seeing that African American women are the targets of specific social welfare policies or that African American men are being disproportionately incarcerated. Both of these results stem from racism, but take on a gendered approach."}
{"text":"In \"Black Sexual Politics\", Hill Collins proposes several ideas for black liberation, though the book is focused on getting individuals to find creative ways to challenge racism, sexism and homophobia as it manifests itself in their own communities. One idea that Hill Collins purports is that African Americans need to create and support avenues of self-expression that allow them to tell their own stories about the effects of racism\/sexism\/homophobia, and to share their emotional and sexual experiences as African American persons. This work is being done, but is largely in its infancy."}
{"text":"Hill Collins also argues that it is critical for African Americans to define new visions of success that resist traditional Western\/American views. She argues that equating masculinity with wealth and femininity with submissiveness and financial dependence is harmful to all groups, but especially for African Americans, who have been traditionally locked out of the economic opportunity structure. In a society where black men face threats to their economic well being, and disproportionately are incarcerated and lack access to quality education, any vision of masculinity that suggests that to be a man is to be financially successful puts a great number of black males at odds. Collins argues for a new, more holistic version of success, that includes visions of the importance of personal character apart from economic achievement."}
{"text":"Hill Collins argues that there needs to be a culture of honesty in the black community, whereby black persons can express their ideas and identities in a whole way. If we do not create the space for black people to express their sexual perspectives freely, then we create a space where the silence and deceptiveness that leads to the spread of HIV\/AIDS to continue. When we can discuss sexuality from multiple perspectives, we allow people the space to talk about sex and sexuality and feel more comfortable engaging their partners in dialogues about their own sexual history, sexual feelings, and lead to STD testing and full appreciation and connection of one another."}
{"text":"In \"Black Sexual Politics\" Collins expresses the view that the black community will not reach its progressive political agenda, nor will it be able to successfully address social issues such as the HIV\/AIDS crisis affecting the black community, if it does not allow marginalized voices like women and LGBT persons to express their perspectives and lifestyles. Collins believes that a group cannot be truly revolutionary or progressive if it works to oppress others. She also believes that a view of the black community that values some identities and expressions over others limits the connectedness that others in that community feel, and prevents issues disproportionately affecting them to be discussed in meaningful ways."}
{"text":"She argues that a narrow black sexual politics that places extreme value on limiting views of the role of the male and the role of the female, and also on the role of appropriate and socially acceptable sexual behavior works to deny LGBT people their agency, and prevents honest dialogue about different types of sexual lifestyles. This can work to the oppression of LGBT people, but also of heterosexual women and men, oppressed by views of sexuality which limit their sexual expression, and thus limit the space for them to talk about their lifestyles in a way that breeds honesty, self-affirmation and prevents the spread of disease."}
{"text":"November Blues is a young adult novel by Sharon M. Draper, first published in 2007. It's the second novel of the Jericho Trilogy, the sequel to \"The Battle of Jericho\". The book tackles and discusses the issue of teen pregnancy, as well as making the readers aware that actions always have consequences and that taking responsibility for those actions is always very important."}
{"text":"November Nelson lost her boyfriend, Josh Prescott, when a pledge stunt went horribly wrong. After his death, November has to deal with the heartache of losing him forever. Also, November realizes that she is pregnant with Josh's child. November faces the pressures of telling her family and friends that she is pregnant at 16, being talked about and laughed at by her classmates at school, and figuring out how to provide for her child."}
{"text":"The book grew out of \"Conditions\" magazine's November 1979 issue, \"Conditions 5: the Black Women's Issue\", originally edited by Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel. \"Conditions 5\" was \"the first widely distributed collection of Black feminist writing in the U.S.\" The anthology was first published in 1983 by , and was reissued by Rutgers University Press in 2000. Where necessary, the 2000 issue contained updates of the contributor's biographies as well as a new preface. The current preface evaluates how the lives of black women have changed since the original book was released. Smith's main concern was in regards to how black women were positively contributing to black feminism. Upon its initial release, \"Home Girls\" \"has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings\"."}
{"text":"Black feminism stems from the idea that women's experiences are intersectional and a reflection of race, sexism, gender oppression, and class. Within the anthology, black women authors take many different approaches to address the issues that arise from their identities and express their support for black feminist organizations. Since its original release there have been numerous events and organizations that work towards building black feminism."}
{"text":"Sexuality is another topic brought up in many of the pieces throughout \"Home Girls\". Black women share their discoveries as well as stories about what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community and how that has shaped them. In the preface, Smith acknowledges black lesbians and their activity within The Ad Hoc Committee \"for an open process, the grass-roots groups that have successfully questioned the undemocratic... tactics of the proposed gay millennium march in Washington D.C in 2000\". Many of the organizations and marches that came to be before and after the publication of \"Home Girls\" are centralized around issues of racial inequality and gender oppression."}
{"text":"The struggle black women face with sexual orientation is suggested in many of the contributor's pieces. Things such as physical appearance, clothes, mannerisms, and makeup affected the way these women were perceived and sexualized throughout their lives. In\"Home Girls\" many of the women reveal their personal stories and accounts of sexual abuse and the continuous sexualization they received. Audre Lorde addresses this and mentions \"Clothes were often the most important way of broadcasting one's chosen sexual role\"."}
{"text":"In relation to sexual orientation many of the writings in \"Home Girls\" contain personal stories about their LBGT experiences and reactions from community members and reactions from the LGBT community. Cheryl Clarke is one of the black feministolor Pre contributors to addresses homophobia within the black community. In her writing, she shares the struggles of LGBT in black communities and the fear they often have to live with."}
{"text":"Together, the topics presented in this anthology exemplify intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions can be suffered together and mold a person's idea of their oppression. A feminist goal is to expand its diversity and inclusiveness. In order to achieve this goal, many activists suggest becoming more knowledgeable about intersectional feminism and its effects on how black women experience oppression and discrimination."}
{"text":"Critical reception for \"Home Girls\" has been mostly positive. One reviewer for the Black American Literature Forum praises the book for its sense of unity and black feminist perspective. As the article states: \"While many of the book's poems strike me as self-indulgent and forced, the majority of the selections are both finely honed and provocative. Herein lies the strength of \"Home Girls\". It consciously broaches issues which have heretofore been given only a faint hearing and thus challenges the reader to rethink not only the past and present but also the future.\""}
{"text":"Confessions of a Video Vixen is a memoir written by Karrine Steffans which details the first 25 years of her life. Part tell-all covering her sexual liaisons with music industry personalities and professional athletes, and part cautionary tale about the dangers of the otherwise romanticized hip-hop music industry, it caused considerable controversy in some circles."}
{"text":"\"Confessions of a Video Vixen\" recounts Steffans' life from her troubled girlhood living in poverty in St. Thomas, through abuse, drugs, rape and living as a teenage runaway who turns to stripping and hip hop modeling to support herself and, later, her young son."}
{"text":"Originally published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, the book was immediately a \"New York Times\" bestseller. (The 2006 paperback edition includes bonus material, and also made the NYT bestseller list.) The book created a stir when it went on sale because of Steffans' allegations of abuse at the hands of her then-husband rapper, Kool G Rap and her claims that she had sexual relationships with numerous famous music stars and athletes, including Jay-Z, Ja Rule, Bobby Brown, Dr. Dre, DMX, Xzibit, Diddy, Usher, Shaquille O'Neal and Irv Gotti."}
{"text":"Coming of Age in Mississippi is a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody about growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-20th century as an African-American woman. The book covers Moody's life from childhood through her mid twenties, including her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement beginning when she was a student at the historically black Tougaloo College. Moody's autobiography details her struggles both against racism among white people and sexism among her fellow civil rights activists. It received many positive reviews and won awards from the National Library Association and the National Council of Christians and Jews."}
{"text":"\"Coming of Age in Mississippi\" is divided into four sections: \"Childhood\", \"High School\", \"College\", and \"The Movement\"."}
{"text":"Moody begins her story on the plantation where she lives with her mother, Toosweet, and her father, Diddly, both sharecroppers, and her younger sister, Adline."}
{"text":"Later, Moody's mother gives birth to her third child, Jr. While Toosweet is pregnant with Jr., her father begins an affair with another woman from the plantation. Shortly after Jr.\u2019s birth, her parents separate."}
{"text":"Moody moves with her mother and younger siblings to town to live with her great aunt and begins grade school. Moody's curiosity about race is sparked when her questions about her two uncles, who appear white, go unanswered. Moody's mother begins a relationship with a man named Raymond, whom she eventually marries and has five more children with by the time Moody is in college."}
{"text":"At nine years old, Moody begins her first job sweeping a porch, earning seventy-five cents a week and two gallons of milk. She experiences her first real competition with Raymond\u2019s sister Darlene; they're the same age and in the same class, constantly competing against one another whenever possible."}
{"text":"Though Moody enjoys attending Centreville church, which Raymond's family belongs to, she is tricked into joining her mother's church: Mt. Pleasant. She resents her mother for some time after that."}
{"text":"Once the family farm falls through, Moody takes on more responsibility to help support the family. When asked to obtain a copy of her birth certificate for graduation, her birth certificate shows up as Annie Mae. When Toosweet requests to have it changed, she is told there would be a fee; Moody asks if she can keep Annie, and so she becomes Annie Mae Moody."}
{"text":"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects is a poetry collection written by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1854. Her non-fiction collection of poems and essays consists of a brief preface followed by a collection of poems and three short writings. \"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\" sold approximately 12,000 copies in its first four years in print and was reprinted at least twenty times during Harper's lifetime. The work includes several poetic responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\". Harper\u2019s work focuses on the themes Christianity, slavery, and women."}
{"text":"\"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\" contains 18 poems. Harper\u2019s poetry is noted for its simple rhythm, biblical imagery, and storytelling style of oral tradition. The themes present in \"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\" focus on Christianity, slavery, and women."}
{"text":"Christianity became widespread to African Americans during the transatlantic slave trade. Before coming to America, African religious beliefs and practices were numerous and varied. Some Africans had been exposed to European Christianity before coming to America, so they were able to bring Christian beliefs with them. However, many slaves converted to Christianity in America because they saw conversion as a road to freedom. Harper's upbringing included a religious education, and therefore, the experiences she had during her childhood schooling bring religion forth as a prominent theme in her works in \"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\". Such works include \u201cThe Syrophoenician Woman\u201d, \u201cBible Defence of Slavery\u201d, \u201cThe Drunkard\u2019s Child\u201d, \u201cThat Blessed Hope\u201d, \u201cThe Dying Christian\u201d, \u201cSaved By Faith\u201d, \u201cThe Prodigal\u2019s Return\u201d, and \u201cEva\u2019s Farewell\u201d."}
{"text":"In \"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\", Harper\u2019s theme of slavery focuses on the struggles slaves faced such as separation and death. Poems that fit into the theme of slavery are \u201cThe Slave Mother\u201d, \u201cEliza Harris\u201d, \u201cThe Slave Auction\u201d, and \u201cThe Fugitive\u2019s Wife\u201d. Harper's most notable abolitionist work, \"Bury Me in a Free Land\", would be published a few years later in 1858."}
{"text":"Harper\u2019s works in \"Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects\" also address the subjects of marriage and motherhood. When Harper travelled to the South for the first time, she was abhorred by the poor treatment and severe hardships of thousands of black women. In fact, she asked white women to help support the black liberation movement by reminding white women of their common womanhood to African American women. Harper's dedication to advocating for civil and women's rights make the female and womanhood a basic concern in her poems. Works that fall under this theme include \u201cReport\u201d, \u201cAdvice to the Girls\u201d, \u201cA Mother\u2019s Heroism\u201d, and \u201cThe Contrast\u201d."}
{"text":"The Yellow House is a memoir by Sarah M. Broom. It is Broom's first book and it was published on August 13, 2019 by Grove Press. \"The Yellow House\" chronicles Broom's family (mapping back approximately 100 years), her life growing up in New Orleans East, and the eventual demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurricane Katrina. Broom also focuses on the aftermath of Katrina and how the disaster altered her family and her neighborhood. At its core, the book examines race, class, politics, family, trauma, and inequality in New Orleans and America. \"The Yellow House\" won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction."}
{"text":"\"The Yellow House\" was published by Grove Press on August 13, 2019, following the publication of an early excerpt in the \"New Yorker\" in 2015. The book debuted at number 11 on the Hardcover Nonfiction best sellers list for the September 1, 2019, edition of \"The New York Times\"."}
{"text":"In November 2019, \"The Yellow House\" won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by both the \"New York Times Book Review\" and the \"Washington Post\". \"The Yellow House\" won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book from the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Awards."}
{"text":"Feathers is a children's historical novel by Jacqueline Woodson that was first published in 2007. The story is about a sixth-grade girl named Frannie growing up in the '70s. One day an unexpected new student causes much chaos to the class because he is the only white boy in the whole school. \"Feathers\" grapples with concepts such as religion, race, hope, and understanding. The book examines what it was like to grow up right after segregation had been outlawed, how all people are equal, and that hope is everywhere. The book was a Newbery Honor winner in 2008."}
{"text":"Taking place in the 1970s, in an urban all African American school, this book highlights the hard topics of racism, faith, hope, and disabilities. A white boy comes to the school and is soon dubbed \"Jesus Boy\". His entrance as the only white student causes tension and misunderstandings. Some of the students believe that he is Jesus and others simply hope he is. He is very quiet and doesn't let Trevor, the class bully, hurt him. He just calmly talks to Trevor and never retaliates."}
{"text":"Later Samantha asks Frannie why she helped Trevor, and Frannie doesn't know. Samantha then admits that she was wrong about Jesus Boy and says she doesn't know what to believe in anymore. Frannie tries to comfort Samantha and says \"Maybe there's a little bit of Jesus inside of all of us. Maybe Jesus is just that something good or something sad or something ... something that makes us do stuff like help Trevor up even when he is cursing us out. Or maybe ... maybe Jesus is just that thing you had when the Jesus Boy got here, Samantha. Maybe Jesus is the hope that you were feeling\" (p.\u00a0109)."}
{"text":"At the end of the book Frannie reflects on all that has been happening in her life. She thinks of her mother's baby, her brother, Samantha's loss of faith, and, especially, Jesus Boy. She remembers the poem she read in class and decides \"Each moment, I am thinking, is a thing with feathers\""}
{"text":"The title of the book, Feathers, is a metaphor that the book revolves around. Woodson introduces it through a poem that Frannie reads in class."}
{"text":"After reading this, Frannie spends the rest of the book trying to understand hope. How does it have feathers?"}
{"text":"The effort to understand one another was the focus of the sixth grade class as soon as Jesus Boy entered their classroom. Through Jesus Boy they realize that even the bully, Trevor, is a normal kid. After the fight Frannie realizes \"Even though he was mean all the time, the sun still stopped and colored him and warmed him\u2500like it did to everybody else\" (p.\u00a021)"}
{"text":"Jesus Boy helped the class to stop beating up each other so much and Trevor got scared by him."}
{"text":"Frannie's older brother is deaf and this is a source of tension throughout the story. Frannie feels compelled to protect her brother in a world of people who do not understand him. One difficulty Sean encounters is girls being attracted to him until they find out he is deaf. Woodson stated in an interview with NPR that she made Sean deaf in order to humanize the deaf. One scene in the book that does this well is when Frannie asks Sean what a guitar sounds like, a game they play with one another. His sign back is 'Like rain. Coming down real soft when it's warm out and you only get a little wet but not cold. That kind of rain.'"}
{"text":"Overall, the book gets mostly high praise, and Jacqueline Woodson is hailed for her beautiful style of writing. One fan says Woodson writes \"pages of poetry\" and \"without any heavy-handedness or manipulation\"."}
{"text":"Jaqueline Woodson has written 29 books spanning from picture books to young adult fiction. Her books have received numerous awards such as the Caldecott Honor, Newbery Honor, and the Coretta Scott King Award. \"Feathers\" most resembles her novel \"Locomotion\" in which she \"tackled grief, trauma, death survival, and hope\". all in a very short book. \"Feathers\" is also short but addresses big concepts of \"hope, healing, faith, and understanding\". Both of the books are around 115 pages and adequately handle their difficult topics."}
{"text":"The History of White People is a 2010 book by Nell Irvin Painter, in which the author explores the idea of whiteness throughout history, beginning with ancient Greece and continuing through the beginning of scientific racism in early modern Europe to 19th- through 21st-century America."}
{"text":"The book describes attitudes toward and definitions of race among Europeans, and particularly Americans of European descent. The author says the idea of race is not just a matter of biology but also includes \"concepts of labor, gender, class, and images of personal beauty\"."}
{"text":"The earliest European societies, including the Greeks and Romans, had no concept of race and classified people by ethnicity and social class, with the lowest class being slaves. Throughout most of European history, slaves were generally of European origin, often from conquered countries. From the fifth to the eleventh century the Vikings were especially prolific slavers, capturing and selling the inhabitants wherever they went. It was only in relatively modern times that slavery became associated with race. In 1790 U.S. citizens were defined as \"free white men\"; this excluded white men who were indentured servants. By the mid 19th century in America, white people (as then defined) were all free; slaves were of African or part-African descent."}
{"text":"When writers and scientists began to explore the concept of race, they focused on Europe, describing three or four different races among Europeans. Much of the classification was done by head shape and skull measurements, as well as height and skin pigmentation. The most attractive and most admirable race was that found in northwestern Europe, while the inhabitants of eastern and southern Europe were classified as lower races. The categorizing of different European races had legal and social effects in the United States, where 19th century immigrants from less favored areas such as Ireland, Italy, and Iberia were treated as less than fully \"white\" for legal and social purposes."}
{"text":"The author traces four consecutive \"enlargements of American whiteness\" by which Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, and other discriminated-against ethnicities gradually became fully accepted into white society. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 eliminated legal discrimination by race. As of the book's publication date, 2010, mixed-race people were more common and were becoming integrated: \"The dark of skin who happen to be rich ... and the light of skin from any (racial background) who are beautiful, are now well on their way to inclusion.\" The author concludes that race has not disappeared from American society \u2013 \"the fundamental black\/white binary endures\" \u2013 but the \"category of whiteness \u2013 or we might say more precisely, a category of nonblackness \u2013 effectively expands.\""}
{"text":"The book was a \"New York Times\" best seller. Paul Devlin, writing in the \"San Francisco Chronicle\", said the book \"is perhaps the definitive story of a most curious adjective. It is a scholarly, non-polemical masterpiece of broad historical synthesis, combining political, scientific, economic and cultural history.\" Linda Gordon of \"The New York Times\" says the book \"has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.\" She adds that she wishes she had had this book, \"an insightful and lively exposition\", to help her teach undergraduate students about race theory. Thomas Rogers in \"Salon\" calls it an \"exhaustive and fascinating new look at the history of the idea of the white race\"."}
{"text":"In January 2019, it was translated into French as \"Histoire des Blancs\"."}
{"text":"If i can cook \/ you know god can"}
{"text":"if i can cook \/ you know god can (sometimes known as \"If I Can Cook You Know God Can\") is a culinary memoir by Ntozake Shange. It was originally published by Beacon Press, in Boston MA, United States, in 1998. The piece is both memoir and cookbook. Short essays precede recipes written in personal vernacular, and these recipes cover locations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the United States."}
{"text":"Chapter 2 takes the reader to St. Louis and Shange uses the experience of listening to a short wave radio emanating the sounds of Fidel Castro as a child to talk about her experiences in Cuba as an adult. She says that her child was one of Cuba's Young Pioneers and shared food, recipes and traditions with children from a multitude of other locations, such as Zimbabwe and Palestine. While in Cuba, the author experiences a blackface performance, which she is horrified by. She eats avocado with beer and reminds herself that \"history, our history, mustn't scare me.\" Cuba's slave trade history is discussed, and Shange is concerned with \"How'd all these hardworking - cutting cane is torturous labor - Africans get fed and what'd they eat?\""}
{"text":"Shange is in Brixton, a working-class West Indian neighborhood and she describes shopping in the area with her daughter, as they look for food items. Savannah and Shange prepare for her friend Leila's birthday dinner, and each of the ingredients used is described. At the end of the chapter, she mentions the fact that Leila's partner Darcus Howe is from Trinidad and Tobago, and makes a reference to the presence of slavery in East India. She ends with the quote: \"Now we are independent. We own the soil. We have our own name. We have our own flag. Let us have some wine and some music.\""}
{"text":"In Chapter 5, Shange is in the world of the Caribbean, and looking at the \"matter of the flyin' fish\" in Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. Here, she describes the different ways in which two communities looked at one commodity. The Trinidad and Tobago fishermen were catching the flyin fish that were essential to the Barbadian diet, and didn\u2019t eat it. While the Barbadians argued that it was wrong for them to catch the fish that they didn\u2019t even eat and then sell it back as a profit, they said that they were only supplying the demand. She then says that who knows what would happen if the Barbadians came after shark meat, which is treasured by the Trinidadians."}
{"text":"Chapter 11 looks at boys. Shange says that from the first, she was expected to serve boys food, and that this was part of a dating ritual \"to prove I was of value, valued my visitors and our time together so much that I made a hands-on effort to create something for whoever this person was\". She discusses her adolescent reaction to it and her later realization that was being taught an important \"Southern\/African tradition of sharing the best I had with visitors\". (p.\u00a080). She describes the link between cooking and self value, as well as the energy and importance of time in the kitchen. She mentions that music can assist the kitchen process."}
{"text":"Chapter 12 looks at the need \"to re-create a 'where' for our people\". It looks at people who do not commit to the American way of life. Shange talks about meeting a Rastafarian in Cancun, Mexico, and the ways in which African culture was destabilized during slavery. She uses the limitation of diet as an example. Yvette, a friend, is used as an example; she explains that her vegetarianism is an alternative choice to the meat and dairy diet suggested by America. In this chapter, Shange looks at the idea that African Americans are a \"people in transition\" describes the first bembe she ever attended and talks about African-American Jews."}
{"text":"The epilogue contains references to Shange's dance experience and talks about sugar, giving people something to make them happy, and providing dessert recipes."}
{"text":"Shange looks at food as a feature of memory as well, for not only is the memory of history bestowed upon food but food, as a product of a long and rich culture, can trigger memory. When Shange spends New Years with her daughter in New York, she has an \"insatiable desire to recreate for her daughter the family holidays she remembered\"."}
{"text":"The recipes and essays are written informally in a personable tone of an experienced person conveying exactly how to recreate a recipe. The recipes make allowances for individual preference and skill level, while at the same time making basic assumptions about the reader's knowledge base. Shange writes in \"trademark lilting vernacular\" The voice of a piece is extremely important, for Shange said in an interview with Neal A. Lester in 1990 that \"I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.\""}
{"text":"M. C. Higgins, the Great, first published in 1974, is a realistic novel by Virginia Hamilton that won the 1975 Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature. It also won the National Book Award in category Children's Books"}
{"text":"and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; it was the first book to do so, and only one other book has done so since (\"Holes\", by Louis Sachar)."}
{"text":"\"M.C. Higgins\" is a bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) that covers three eventful days in the life of teenager Mayo Cornelius Higgins. It is set in the Appalachian Mountains on Sarah's Mountain, a fictional mountain in Kentucky, near the Ohio River, that is being encroached upon by a mining company. The book highlights the strange, almost surreal customs of the hill people, including their traditions of song and superstition. At its core is the reconciliation M.C. must make between tradition and change."}
{"text":"The book has been translated into many languages, including Japanese and German, and was made into a movie in 1986."}
{"text":"Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses."}
{"text":"The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, the young woman becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time."}
{"text":"\"Kindred \" explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism."}
{"text":"While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, \"Kindred\" is considered to cross genre boundaries. It has been classified also as literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as \"a kind of grim fantasy.\""}
{"text":"\"Kindred\" scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something \"elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative,\" thus giving the impression that the main characters are participating in matters greater than their personal experiences."}
{"text":"Dana wakes up in the hospital with her arm amputated. Police deputies question her about the circumstances surrounding the loss of her arm and ask her whether her husband Kevin, a white man, beats her. Dana tells them that it was an accident and that Kevin is not to blame. When Kevin visits her, they are both afraid of telling the truth because they know nobody would believe them."}
{"text":"In a flashback, Dana recounts how she met Kevin while doing minimum-wage temporary jobs at an auto-parts warehouse. Kevin becomes interested in Dana when he learns she is a writer like him, and she befriends him even though he is white and their coworkers judge their relationship. They find they have much in common; both are orphans, both love to write, and both their families disapproved of their aspiration to become writers. They become lovers."}
{"text":"In a flashback, Dana remembers how she and Kevin were married. Both of their families opposed the marriage due to ethnic bias. While Kevin's reactionary sister is prejudiced against African Americans, Dana's uncle abhors the idea of a white man eventually inheriting his property. Only Dana's aunt favors the union, as it would mean that her niece's children would have lighter skin. Kevin and Dana marry without any family present."}
{"text":"Dana's and Kevin's happy reunion is short-lived, as Kevin has a hard time adjusting to the present after living in the past for five years. He shares a few details of his life in the past with Dana: he witnessed terrible atrocities against slaves, traveled farther up north, worked as a teacher, helped slaves escape, and grew a beard to disguise himself from a lynch mob. Disconcerted about his trouble in re-entering his former world, he grows angry and cold. Deciding to let him work his feelings out for himself, Dana packs a bag in case she time travels again."}
{"text":"Dana and Kevin travel to Baltimore to investigate the fate of the Weylin plantation after the death of Rufus, but they find very little; a newspaper notice reporting Rufus's death as a result of his house catching fire, and a Slave Sale announcement listing all the Weylin slaves except Nigel, Carrie, Joe, and Hagar. Dana speculates that Nigel covered up the murder by starting the fire, and feels responsible for the sale of the slaves. To that, Kevin responds that she cannot do anything about the past, and now that Rufus is finally dead, they can return to their peaceful life together."}
{"text":"Realistic depiction of slavery and slave communities."}
{"text":"\"Kindred \"was written to explore how a modern black woman would experience the time of a slavery society, where most black people were considered as property; a world where \"all of society was arrayed against you.\""}
{"text":"In several interviews, Butler has mentioned that she wrote \"Kindred\" to counteract stereotypical conceptions of the submissiveness of slaves. While studying at Pasadena City College, Butler heard a young man from the Black Power Movement express his contempt for older generations of African-Americans for what he considered their shameful submission to white power. Butler realized the young man did not have enough context to understand the necessity to accept abuse just to keep oneself and one's family alive and well. Thus, Butler resolved to create a modern African-American character, who would go back in time to see how well he (Butler's protagonist was originally male) could withstand the abuses his ancestors had suffered."}
{"text":"Therefore, Dana's memories of her enslavement, as Ashraf A. Rushdy explains, become a record of the \"unwritten history\" of African-Americans, a \"recovery of a coherent story explaining Dana's various losses.\" By living these memories, Dana is enabled to make the connections between slavery and current social situations, including the exploitation of blue-collar workers, police violence, rape, domestic abuse, and segregation."}
{"text":"Trauma and its connection to historical memory (or historical amnesia)."}
{"text":"Many academics have extended Dana's loss as a metaphor for the \"lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche\" to include other meanings: Pamela Bedore, for example, reads it as the loss of Dana's na\u00efvete regarding the supposed progress of racial relations in the present. For Ashraf Rushdy, Dana's missing arm is the price she must pay for her attempt to change history. Robert Crossley quotes Ruth Salvaggio as inferring that the amputation of Dana's left arm is a distinct \"birthmark\" that represents a part of a \"disfigured heritage.\" Scholars have also noted the importance of Kevin's forehead scar, with Diana R. Paulin arguing that it symbolizes Kevin's changing understanding of racial realities, which constitute \"a painful and intellectual experience.\""}
{"text":"The construction of the concept of \"race\" and its connections to slavery are central themes in Butler's novel. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint place \"Kindred\" as a key science fiction literary text of the 1960s and 1970s black consciousness period, noting that Butler uses the time travel trope to underscore the perpetuation of past racial discrimination into the present and, perhaps, the future of America. The lesson of Dana's trips to the past, then, is that \"we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction.\""}
{"text":"The novel's focus on how the system of slavery shapes its central characters dramatizes society's power to construct raced identities. The reader witnesses the development of Rufus from a relatively decent boy allied to Dana to a \"complete racist\" who attempts to rape her as an adult. Similarly, Dana and Kevin's prolonged stay in the past reframes their modern attitudes. Butler's depiction of her principal character as an independent, self-possessed, educated African-American woman defies slavery's racist and sexist objectification of black people and women."}
{"text":"\"Kindred\" also challenges the fixity of \"race\" through the interracial relationships that form its emotional core. Dana's kinship to Rufus disproves America's erroneous concepts of racial purity. It also represents the \"inseparability\" of whites and blacks in America. The negative reactions of characters in the past and the present to Dana and Kevin's integrated relationship highlight the continuing hostility of both white and black communities to interracial mixing. At the same time, the relationship of Dana and Kevin extends to concept of \"community\" from people related by ethnicity to people related by shared experience. In these new communities whites and black people may acknowledge their common racist past and learn to live together."}
{"text":"The depiction of Dana's white husband, Kevin, also serves to examine the concept of racial and gender privilege. In the present, Kevin seems unconscious of the benefits he derives from his skin pigmentation as well as of the way his actions serve to disenfranchise Dana. Once he goes to the past, however, he must not just resist accepting slavery as the normal state of affairs, but dissociate himself from the unrestricted power white males enjoy as their privilege. His prolonged stay in the past transforms him from a naive white man oblivious about racial issues into an anti-slave activist fighting racial oppression."}
{"text":"Originally, Butler intended for the protagonist of \"Kindred \"to be a man, but as she explained in her interview, she could not do so because a man would immediately be \"perceived as dangerous\": \"[s]o many things that he did would have been likely to get him killed. He wouldn't even have time to learn the rules...of submission.\" She then realized that sexism could work in favor of a female protagonist, \"who might be equally dangerous\" but \"would not be perceived so.\""}
{"text":"Similarly, Missy Dehn Kubistchek reads Butler's novel as \"African-American woman\u2019s quest for understanding history and self\" which ends with Dana extending the concept of \"kindred\" to include both her black and white her heritage as well as her white husband while \"insisting on her right to self definition.\""}
{"text":"\"Kindred\"\u2019s title has several meanings: at its most literal, it refers to the genealogical link between its modern-day protagonist, the slave-holding Weylins, and both the free and bonded Greenwoods; at its most universal, it points to the kinship of all Americans regardless of ethnic background."}
{"text":"Since Butler\u2019s novel challenges readers to come to terms with slavery and its legacy, one significant meaning of the term \"kindred\" is the United States\u2019 history of miscegenation and its denial by official discourses. This kinship of black people and whites must be acknowledged if America is to move into a better future."}
{"text":"On the other hand, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy contends, Dana's journey to the past serves to redefine her concept of kinship from blood ties to that of \"spiritual kinship\" with those she chooses as her family: the Weylin slaves and her white husband, Kevin. This sense of the term \"kindred\" as a community of choice is clear from Butler's first use of the word to indicate Dana and Kevin's similar interests and shared beliefs. Dana and Kevin's relationship, in particular, signals the way for black and white America to reconcile: they must face the country's racist past together so they can learn to co-exist as kindred."}
{"text":"Publishers and academics have had a hard time categorizing \"Kindred\". In an interview with Randall Kenan, Butler stated that she considered \"Kindred\" \"literally\" as \"fantasy.\" According to Pamela Bedore, Butler's novel is difficult to classify because it includes both elements of the slave narrative and science fiction. Frances Smith Foster insists \"Kindred\" does not have one genre and is in fact a blend of \"realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo-slave narrative, and initiation novel.\" Sherryl Vint describes the narrative as a fusion of the fantastical and the real, resulting in a book that is \"partly historical novel, partly slave narrative, and partly the story of how a twentieth century black woman comes to terms with slavery as her own and her nation's past.\""}
{"text":"\"Kindred\" \u2019s story is further fragmented by Dana\u2019s report of her time traveling, which uses flashbacks to connect the present to the past. Robert Crossley sees this \"foreshortening\" of the past and present as a \"lesson in historical realities.\" Because the story is told from the first-person point of view of Dana, readers feel they are witnessing firsthand the cruelty and hardships that many slaves faced every day in the South and so identify with Dana's gut-wrenching reactions to the past. This autobiographical voice, along with Dana's harrowing recollection of the brutality of slavery and her narrow escape from it, is one of the key elements that have made critics classify \"Kindred\" as a neo-slave narrative."}
{"text":"Another strategy Butler uses to add dramatic interest to \"Kindred\"\u2019s story is the deliberate delay of the description of Dana and Kevin\u2019s ethnicities. Butler has stated in an interview she did not want to give their \"race\" away yet since it would have less of an impact and the reader would not react the way that she wanted them to. Dana's ethnicity becomes revealed in chapter two, \"The Fire,\" while Kevin's ethnicity becomes clear to the reader in chapter three, \"The Fall,\" which also includes the history of Dana's and Kevin's interracial relationship."}
{"text":"Butler also uses Alice as Dana's doppelg\u00e4nger to compare how their decisions are a reflection of their environment. According to Missy Dehn Kubitschek, each woman seems to see a reflection of herself in the other; each is the vision of what could be (could have been) the possible fate of the other given different circumstances. According to Bedore, Butler's use of repetition blurs the lines between the past and present relationships. As time goes on, Alice and Rufus\u2019 relationship begins to seem more like a miserable married couple while Dana and Kevin become somewhat distant."}
{"text":"Butler's field research in Maryland also influenced her writing of \"Kindred\". She traveled to the Eastern Shore to Talbot County where she wandered a bit. She also conducted research at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society. She toured Mount Vernon, the plantation home of America's first president, George Washington. At the time, guides referred to the slaves as \"servants\" and avoided referring to the estate as a former slave plantation. Butler also spent time reading slave narratives, including the autobiography of Fredrick Douglass, who escaped and became an abolitionist leader. She read many grim accounts, but decided she needed to moderate events in her book in order to attract enough readers."}
{"text":"\"Kindred \"is Butler's bestseller, with Beacon Press advertising it as \"the classic novel that has sold more than 450,000 copies.\""}
{"text":"Among Butler's peers, the novel has been well received. Speculative writer Harlan Ellison has praised \"Kindred \"as \"that rare magical artifact\u2026 the novel one returns it to again and again\", while writer Walter Mosley described the novel as \"everything the literature of science fiction can be.\""}
{"text":"Book reviewers were enthusiastic. \"Los Angeles Herald-Examiner\" writer Sam Frank described the novel as \"[a] shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.\" Reviewer Sherley Anne Williams from \"Ms\". defined the novel as \"a startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery. \"Seattle Post-Intelligencer\" writer John Marshall said that \"Kindred\" is \"the perfect introduction to Butler\u2019s work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction.\" \"The Austin Chronicle\" writer Barbara Strickland declared \"Kindred\" to be \"a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction.\""}
{"text":"High school and college courses have frequently chosen \"Kindred\" as a text to be read. Linell Smith of \"The Baltimore Sun\" describes it as \"a celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture.\" Speaking at the occasion of Beacon Press' reissue of \"Kindred\" for its 25th Anniversary, African-American literature professor Roland L. Williams said that the novel has remained popular over the years because of its crossover appeal, which \"continues to find a variety of audiences--fantasy, literary and historical\" and because \"it is an exceedingly well-written and compelling story\u2026 that asks you to look back in time and at the present simultaneously.\""}
{"text":"Ordinary Light: A Memoir is a 2015 book by poet Tracy K. Smith. It was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction."}
{"text":"The 368-page book was published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 2, 2015."}
{"text":"Writing in \"Slate\", Stacia L. Brown says \"most of the time\", \"Ordinary Light\" is \"a coming-of-age story about a middle-class black girl with a relatively idyllic life...the story of the healthy, nurturing bond between a black mother and daughter.\" However, Brown found the book \"most powerful when it returns to the subject\" with which Smith opens the narrative: \"her mother\u2019s illness and Smith\u2019s slow-dawning realization that she will not recover\"\u2014Smith's mother died shortly after Smith graduated from college."}
{"text":"Smith, whose first books were poetry, has said that in retrospect, the move to writing in prose was a necessity for her to engage the story of her relationship with her mother. \"I had found a way of exploring my own private material in poems. I knew the kinds of answers\u2014that\u2019s not the right noun because I don't think a poem \"solves\" things\u2014but I knew the kind of encounter I was capable of creating in a poem. I realized that if I wanted to get something new out of that material I needed to shift languages.\""}
{"text":"\"Ordinary Light\" received widely favorable reviews and was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction."}
{"text":"Piecing Me Together is a 2017 children's book by Ren\u00e9e Watson. The first person novel tells the story of Jade, an ambitious African American high school student. The book was well reviewed and won several awards."}
{"text":"The book was well reviewed including starred reviews by \"The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books\", Kirkus Reviews, which also named it a best book of 2017, and \"School Library Journal\", which also named it a best book of 2017."}
{"text":"The book was recognized by the American Library Association at the 2018 Youth Media Awards. Watson was awarded the Coretta Scott King Author Award; in her acceptance speech Watson thanked the award committee for, \"bring visibility to black characters who are bold and brave, beautiful and brilliant.\" \"Piecing Me Together\" was also named a Newbery Honor book with the award committee citing its, \"Through artful and poetic language, Watson explores themes of race, class, gender and body image in this dynamic journey.\" Bank Street College of Education also recognized the novel with its Josette Frank Award."}
{"text":"So You Want to Talk About Race"}
{"text":"So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book by Ijeoma Oluo. Each chapter title is a question about race in contemporary America. Oluo outlines her opinions on the topics as well as advice about how to talk about the issues. The book received positive critical reception, with renewed interest following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, after which the book re-entered \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list."}
{"text":"Author Ijeoma Oluo was an editor-at-large at \"The Establishment\". \"So You Want to Talk About Race\" is her first book. Oluo was convinced into writing a book by her agent, who conceived of a \"guidebook\" in which Oluo answered questions she regularly received on social media or addressed in her essays. Oluo was reluctant to spend so much time writing about race, but was inspired after beginning to ask people what issues they face when talking about race and hearing the responses of people of color."}
{"text":"The book was published by Seal Press."}
{"text":"The book is about race in the contemporary United States, each chapter titled after a question. Oluo makes the argument that America's political, economic and social systems are systematically\/institutionally racist. The book provides advice for readers when discussing race-related subjects, such as how to avoid acting defensive or getting off-topic. Statistics are used to support the book's arguments. Oluo also describes her upbringing and experience living in Seattle, Washington. She was raised by a white single mother and became a single mother herself to two mixed-race sons at a young age."}
{"text":"The book also covers topics including affirmative action, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, microaggressions, police brutality and the school-to-prison pipeline. Oluo argues that use of the word \"nigger\" or other racial slurs by white people is not appropriate even if the intention is ironic or the motive anti-racist."}
{"text":"The book received renewed attention following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Having been listed for one week previously, it re-entered \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list in the category Combined Print & E-book Nonfiction on June 14, 2020, peaking at position #2 on June 21. It remained on the list until September 13 and reappeared October 4."}
{"text":"\"Bustle\" named \"So You Want to Talk about Race\" to a list of 14 recommended debut books by women, praising Oluo's \"no holds barred writing style\", as well as to a list of the 16 best non-fiction books of January 2018. \"Harper's Bazaar\" also named it to a list of 10 best new books of 2018, saying \"Oluo crafts a straightforward guidebook to the nuances of conversations surrounding race in America.\" \"The New York Times\" listed the book in its \"New & Noteworthy\" column."}
{"text":"Ferguson criticised the use of the term \"Indigenous American\" in the book as an example of \"Oluo's own basic assumptions that create an inhospitable climate for other racially marked bodies\". Oluo responded that future editions of the book would instead use the term \"indigenous peoples\". Bhatt suggested that a further reading list would have improved the book."}
{"text":"Arilla Sun Down is a 1976 children's novel by Virginia Hamilton and is about the life experiences of Arilla, a young girl of African American and American Indian parentage."}
{"text":"A review of \"Arilla Sun Down\" in \"The Best in Children's Books: The University of Chicago Guide to Children's Literature, 1973-78\" stated \"Hamilton is a genius with words; once accustomed to the pattern, the reader hears the singing quality. What is outstanding in the story is the depth and nuance of the author's perception of the young adolescent, the brilliant characterization, and the dramatic impact of some of the episodes.\" and Margaret Bernice Smith Bristow, writing about Hamilton in \"The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature\", found \"Her use of unconventional stream of consciousness and language in \"Arilla Sun Down\" (1976) is also noteworthy.\""}
{"text":"\"Arilla Sun Down\" has also been reviewed by \"Kirkus Reviews\", \"Children's Literature Association Quarterly\", the \"English Journal\", and the \"School Library Journal\"."}
{"text":"The press was closed down in 2004 due to lack of funds and energy. It then had reopened in 2011 by Dr. Alarcon with the help of Christina L. Guti\u00e9rrez and Sara A. Ram\u00edrez."}
{"text":"TWP taught Ramirez a deeper sense of women of color, all of which were thinkers, writers, and artists in which their activism; this led to her passion of finding their publishing. Alarcon was at the top of her list of activists in which she learned about TWP and its closing. \u00a0Ramirez brought back the publishing movement because she and the resources support to do so for feminism of color. In 2011, Ramirez asked Alarcon if she could revitalize TWP project and resulted in the rebirth of TWP. Without Ramirez, the press would not have reopened or functioning as of today."}
{"text":"She is also the First Core Collective Member is the first member of a national collective working that helped revive TWP."}
{"text":"TWP was revived to honor and continue the legacy of women of color publishing. It has also published works by notable women of color such as Gloria Anzald\u00faa's \"Living Chicana Theory\" (1998), Cherrie Moraga's \"The Sexuality of Latinas\" (1993)\",\" Carla Trujillo's \"Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About\" (1991), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's \"Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\" (1994) and Ana Castillo's \"The Sexuality of Latinas\" (co-editor, with Norma Alarc\u00f3n and Cherr\u00ede Moraga) (1993)."}
{"text":"TWP believes that language, art, and media are tools for creating dynamic social change. The tools expand access to the work of activist scholars and artists dedicated to liberation from the historical injustices of colonialism and imperialism. They also encourage reader to collaborate with them to envisioning a world for women of color that incorporates migratory, diasporic, and indigenous women both within and beyond U.S. national borders."}
{"text":"All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave"}
{"text":"All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982) is a landmark feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies printed in numerous editions, co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith."}
{"text":"Hull received the National Institute's Women of Color Award for her contribution to this book. Her contribution to this \"landmark scholarship directed attention to the lives of Black women and, combined with the numerous articles she wrote thereafter, helped remedy the emphasis within Feminist Studies on white women and within Black studies on Black men\"."}
{"text":"The interest in black feminism was on the rise in the 1970s, through the writings of Mary Helen Washington, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and others."}
{"text":"In 1981, the anthology \"This Bridge Called My Back\", edited by Cherr\u00ede Moraga and Gloria E. Anzald\u00faa, was published and \"But Some of Us Are Brave\" was published the following year. In both anthologies, the emphasis was placed on the intersection between race and gender. The contributors argued that previous waves of feminism had focused on issues related to white women. They wanted to negotiate a large space for women of color. According to Teresa de Lauretis, \"This Bridge Called My Back\" and \"But Some Women Are Brave\" revealed \"the feelings, the analyses, and the political positions of feminists of color, and their critiques of white or mainstream feminism\" and created a \"shift in feminist consciousness.\""}
{"text":"In the 2000 reprint of their anthology, editors Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith described how in 1992 black feminists mobilized \"a remarkable national response\" - \"African American Women in Defense of Ourselves\" - to the controversy surrounding the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States against the backdrop of allegations by law professor Anita Hill, about sexual harassment that became part of Thomas' confirmation hearings."}
{"text":"Legal scholar Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw cited \"But Some of Us Are Brave\", at the beginning of her seminal 1989 paper, \"Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics\" in which she introduced the concept of Intersectionality. Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing intersectional theory to feminism. Crenshaw noted that it was one of the \"very few Black women's studies books\". She used the title \"All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave\", as her \"point of departure\" to \"develop a Black feminist criticism\"."}
{"text":"Barbara Y. Welke published her article entitled \"When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855\u20131914\", in reference to Hull et al., in 1995 in the \"Law and History Review.\" Welke wrote how Crenshaw, referring to \"But Some of Us Are Brave\", said that the title \"sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis."}
{"text":"Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment is a 1990 book by Patricia Hill Collins."}
{"text":"In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In \"Black Feminist Thought\", originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music, and oral history, the result is a book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon."}
{"text":"For young Black girls, the manipulation of images is also an influence. From a 2016 study by University of Pennsylvania associate professor, Charlotte E. Jacobs, utilizing Black Feminist Thought as an educational work for Black girls in media depictions. Coupled with the inherent knowledge and experiences of Black girls, Jacobs explained how it is able to provide an \"opportunity to develop critical media literacy skills.\" Knowing this frameworks aids in their own viewpoints and stances to media representations in understanding and deciphering the images and meaning behind such imagery. Moving beyond the surface images and using this framework as a means of combatting against the prevalent, normalized view of characters and ideals within the media that are shown as representations of and for young Black girls."}
{"text":"With the success of \"Black Feminist Thought\", Collins gained more recognition as a \"social theorist, drawing from many intellectual traditions.\" Collins' work has now been published and used in many different fields including philosophy, history, psychology and sociology."}
{"text":"The University of Cincinnati named Collins The Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in 1996, making her the first ever African-American, and only the second woman, to hold this position. She received Emeritus status in the Spring of 2005, and became a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The University of Maryland named Collins a Distinguished University Professor in 2006.\""}
{"text":"\"Black Feminist Thought\" is used in various university African American and Women Studies courses."}
{"text":"Black feminism remains important because U.S. Black women constitute an oppressed group. As a collectivity, U.S. Black women participate in a dialectical relationship linking African American women's oppression and activism. Dialectical relationships of this sort mean that two parties are opposed and opposite. As long as Black women's subordination within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation persists, Black feminism as an activist response to that oppression will remain needed."}
{"text":"\"With the publication of Black Feminist Thought, black feminism has moved to a new level. Her work sets a standard for the discussion of black women's lives, experiences, and thought that demands rigorous attention to the complexity of these experiences and an exploration of a multiplicity of responses.\""}
{"text":"Black Feminist Thought provides a synthesis of a body of knowledge that is crucial to putting in perspective the situation of Black Women and their place in the overall struggle to reduce and eliminate gender, race, and class inequalities. The book provides an analysis of the ideas of Black Women, particularly those ideas that reflect a consciousness in opposition to oppression."}
{"text":"\"Black Feminist Thought\" won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1993 and the C. Wright Mills Award of The Society for the Study of Social Problems in 1990. According to the American Sociological Association, \"The Jessie Bernard Award is given in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society. The contribution may be in empirical research, theory, or methodology. It is presented for significant cumulative work done throughout a professional career.\""}
{"text":"The Society for the Study of Social Problems \"annually gives its C. Wright Mills Award to the author of what the committee considers to be the most outstanding book written in the tradition of C. Wright Mills and his dedication to a search for a sophisticated understanding of the individual and society.\""}
{"text":"Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More is a memoir and the debut book by Janet Mock, an American writer and transgender activist. It was published on 1 February 2014 by Atria Books. The book has been praised by Melissa Harris-Perry, bell hooks, Laverne Cox, and Barbara Smith. It debuted in 19th position on \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list for Hardcover Nonfiction. The book's original title was \"Fish Food\". The memoir follows Mock's journey as a transgender girl and young woman in Hawaii."}
{"text":"In \"Redefining Realness,\" Janet Mock describes her life as a transgender woman from childhood to adulthood. Mock opens the book with a scene from 2009, where she starts to tell her boyfriend Aaron that she is transgender and then starts telling her story from childhood."}
{"text":"In 1989, as children, Mock's friend and neighbor Marylin dares Mock to take her grandmother's dress down from the clothesline and put it on. After being caught, Mock is scolded by her grandmother and mother for wearing a dress. At four years old, Mock discovers that her father is cheating on her mother. Her parents eventually split up and at age seven Mock is sent to live with her father and brother, Chad, in Oakland, California. While there, her father tries to instill masculinity into young Mock, pushing her to participate in sports and other activities that her brother enjoys."}
{"text":"Mock's father gets a new girlfriend, and that girlfriend's son, a boy much older than Mock, molests her."}
{"text":"Mock, Chad, and their younger brother Jeff lived with their older sister Cori and her children. While in school in Hawaii, Mock meets Wendi, another transgender girl. Through her friendship with Wendi, Mock becomes more confident, dresses more feminine, and has access to estrogen pills. At age thirteen, Mock comes out as gay to her mother, and Wendi helps her become even more feminine. Together, they meet other transgender women and drag queens."}
{"text":"Mock's mother gets back together with Cori's father, her boyfriend from high school, named Rick. Mock attends Moanalua High School, a rigorous school. She joins the volleyball team, and becomes more confident in her femininity. She continues to meet up with Wendi, who develops a passion for makeup."}
{"text":"Mock becomes class treasurer at Moanalua. After taking estrogen in secret, she talks to her family to come out as a woman and ask to be called Janet. She repeatedly gets sent home from school for breaking the dress code by wearing skirts. She graduates from estrogen pills to shots, which she pays for in cash. She meets a boy named Adrian, who shows interest in her but rejects her when he discovers she is transgender."}
{"text":"Mock poses for a photographer, Felix, in lingerie. This is, she says, the decision she regrets most. She gets $1500 for two modeling sessions."}
{"text":"Mock goes to Bangkok, Thailand, for GRS. Dr. R. and Dr. C. perform the surgery. In recovery, Mock meets an older transgender Australian woman, Genie. Mock returns to Hawaii on December 28 and her mother embraces her tearfully. While Mock recovers, her mother takes care of her. Mock accepts her mother's faults and the family is loving."}
{"text":"Returning to 2009, having told her story to Aaron, Mock waits for a reaction. Their relationship is inconsistent for a while, and Mock makes a new friend in Mia, the woman who hired her for a \"People\" magazine job. Mock comes out to Mia as transgender. After eight months of no contact from Aaron, he comes to her apartment in the middle of the night. They reconcile, and move in together soon after. The book ends with a discussion of LGBT representation in the media and the perception that transgender women need to be out and visible at all times."}
{"text":"On Christmas Eve 2013, Mock launched the \"Redefining Realness Storygiving Campaign\". The campaign fulfilled 127 book requests from people who wished to read \"Redefining Realness\" but had financial constraints."}
{"text":"Mock has said that she wrote \"Redefining Realness\" for transgender girls of color, particularly, her own childhood self. However, many cisgender women of color have connected to themes and moments in the memoir."}
{"text":"\"Redefining Realness\" is praised for being one of a small number of literary texts written by transgender people of color, especially ones that feature themes of reading. \"Redefining Realness\" has also been praised for its complexity in representation of transgender people of color and for combining Western and African structures of autobiography."}
{"text":"A 2014 review of the book claims that while Mock's memoir is personal, it reaches across the queer, transgender, and female communities to relate to many people."}
{"text":"In the paper \"Redefining Realness?: On Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, TS Madison, and the Representation of Transgender Women of Color in Media\", scholar Julian Kevon Glover complicates the popular reception of \"Redefining Realness\". Glover states that Mock's memoir has gained such high esteem because Mock's transition journey reflects traditional heteronormative norms, beauty standards, and respectability politics. Glover states that many transgender women who do not uphold heteronormative ideals rarely get as much media prestige. While the popularity of \"Redefining Realness\" is significant for representation of transgender women, Glover states, many transgender activists are denied media presence because their bodies or actions are not in line with respectability politics."}
{"text":"Mock published a second memoir, \"Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me,\" which covers her twenties, a period not much discussed in \"Redefining Realness.\""}
{"text":"Zora Neale Hurston's \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" was a significant influence in Mock's writing of \"Redefining Realness.\" \"Their Eyes\" was an important book in Mock's girlhood because it was a book about Black women, identity, and love. Other Black female authors that were formative for Mock and her development of \"Redefining Realness\" were Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde. References to \"Their Eyes Were Watching God\" appear throughout the book. She also includes quotes from Ralph Ellsion, Gloria Anzaldua, and James Baldwin."}
{"text":"In a review by David B. Green Jr., \"Redefining Realness\" was stated to do more than just tell a personal story as it builds from the tradition of earlier women of color writers, such as those Mock references in the memoir. Green states that Mock's memoir relates to women of all kinds, not just transgender women of color."}
{"text":"Autobiography of a Family Photo is a 1995 book by Jacqueline Woodson. The book covers childhood, the growth of dark emotional and sexual tension, and the terrors of war."}
{"text":"Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 is a 2018 children's picture book told in poetry and prose by writer Alice Faye Duncan and illustrator R. Gregory Christie, published by Calkins Creek."}
{"text":"The book received the 2019 Coretta Scott King Honor Award for Illustration. In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews praised the ability of how the \"strong historical details back up the organizing feat\u2026(t)he narrative is set in vignettes that jump between verse and prose, set against Christie\u2019s bold paintings\u2026 encapsulates the bravery, intrigue, and compassion that defined a generation, presenting a history that everyone should know: required and inspired.\" The School Library Journal noted the book as a \"a superbly written and illustrated work. A first purchase for public and school libraries.\u201d"}
{"text":"An Untamed State is the debut novel of writer Roxane Gay, first published in 2014 by Grove Atlantic."}
{"text":"Mireille Duval Jameson is born and raised in the United States, her parents are from Haitian descent. Her parents move back to Haiti. While vacationing at her parents' house with her husband and child in Haiti, she is kidnapped. When her father, who by now has become a wealthy Haitian developer, refuses to pay her ransom, she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors, who keep her imprisoned for 13 days before finally releasing her."}
{"text":"In the first portion of the book, called \"Happily Ever After,\" the novel moves back and forth in time between Mireille's captivity and her earlier life, meeting and falling in love with husband Michael during graduate school in the Midwest of the United States."}
{"text":"The latter section of the novel, \"Once Upon a Time,\" follows Mireille in the aftermath of her trauma, including her time living with Michael's mother, Lorraine, on the family farm in Nebraska."}
{"text":"\"An Untamed State\" received positive reviews upon publication. Nolan Feeney writing for Time (magazine) called it a \"riveting debut\" that \"captivates from its opening sentence and doesn\u2019t let go.\" The Los Angeles Times called it \"suspenseful, immediate and realistic.\" The A.V. Club awarded it an A letter grade and praised it as \"a gripping psychological portrait of how trauma remakes the body to respond only to itself.\""}
{"text":"Gay was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction in 2015 for \"An Untamed State\"."}
{"text":"In March 2016 director Gina Prince-Bythewood announced she would be adapting the novel into a feature film for Fox Searchlight. Prince-Bythewood and Gay will co-write the film, to star Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Prince-Bythewood will direct and will also produce with Michael De Luca. Prince-Bythewood and Mbatha-Raw previously collaborated on \"Beyond the Lights\"."}
{"text":"Men We Reaped is a memoir by African-American writer Jesmyn Ward and published by Bloomsbury in 2013. Ward describes her own personal history and the deaths of five Black men in her life over a four-year span. \"Men We Reaped\" won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston\/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction."}
{"text":"The book\u2019s title comes from a Harriet Tubman quotation, on the occasion of the unsuccessful assault of the all-Black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry upon the Confederate forces at Fort Wagner during the American Civil War: \"We saw the lightning and that was the guns; We heard the thunder and that was the big guns; We heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.\""}
{"text":"Five men in Ward's life die in the space of four years. Black men between the ages of 19-32, including her brother, Joshua, killed by a white drunk driver. Though seemingly unconnected, Ward takes her readers on a journey\u2014personal, familial and communal\u2014showing how they were in reality bonded by identity and place, and how race, poverty and gender predetermined the outcome of their lives."}
{"text":"Ward learns at an early age how girls are treated differently than boys, when she gets into trouble for doing things her cousins do freely (smoking), and also seeing how her father gets to spend the family money on a motorcycle, and then ride away on it, while her mother works extra hard to put food on the table. She also learns that for her male relatives, being Black is dangerous in itself, as her mother and grandmother worry about them being arrested or experiencing violence."}
{"text":"As her mother works long hours as a maid, Ward is expected to care for her younger siblings and the household. She suffers from depression. At school, she experiences bullying. Her mother's rich, white employer offers to pay Ward's tuition for private school. There, however, she must deal with being the only Black girl in a white environment. She experiences racism and rejection."}
{"text":"Ward's father is now living in New Orleans. When Ward and her siblings visit, their mother sends them with groceries, because she doesn't trust him to feed the children. Her brother Joshua moves in with him, and Ward later learns that he is dealing crack to help his father pay his bills."}
{"text":"Ward heads out of state for university, to Stanford, becoming the first member of her family to attend college. Her grief for the loss of her brother never leaves her, but she knows it will change over time. Ward closes with her memory of riding in a car with Joshua, declaring, \"I don't ride like that anymore\", and imagining that when her life is over, Joshua will ride up and ask her to go for one more ride."}
{"text":"The men \"reaped\" in the book, narrated in reverse of the order in which they died:"}
{"text":"\"Men We Reaped\" was enthusiastically received by critics, and was named one of the best books of 2013 by \"The New York Times Book Review\", \"Publishers Weekly\", \"Time\", and \"Vogue\"."}
{"text":"\"NPR\"'s Richard Torres calls \"Men We Reaped\" a \"superb memoir\", that takes the reader behind the statistics of Black deaths, on an ambitious journey into the history of the small deep-south town, Ward's own community and family, and the individual stories, intertwining them capably and sensitively. He writes, \"Ward's deceptively conversational prose masks her uncommon skill at imagery. She makes you feel the anguish of each lost life, as well as her survivor's guilt, with its ever-present haunt of memory,\" and lauds how Ward is \"candid enough to paint the flaws in the deceased as well as their good qualities. (In other words, Ward humanizes instead of canonizes.) She's also talented enough to turn such prose into poetry.\""}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" summarizes that \"Men We Reaped\" is \"a modern rejoinder to \"Black Like Me\", \"Beloved\" and other stories of struggle and redemption\u2014beautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear\", while \"Publishers Weekly\" calls it \"riveting\", and declares that \"Ward has a soft touch, making these stories heartbreakingly real through vivid portrayal and dialogue.\""}
{"text":"After Tupac And D Foster (2008) is a novel written by Jacqueline Woodson. Set within a community affected by the life of Tupac Shakur, the novel follows three young girls as they group up in that community. The novel received a Newbery Medal Honor in 2009 and won the American Library Association Award and the 2009 Josette Frank Award."}
{"text":"\"After Tupac And D Foster\" is based on three girls: two black eleven year old girls, Neeka and the anonymous narrator, and D Foster, who was of mixed race and had just moved into Neeka and the narrator's neighborhood in Queens, New York. Their experiences are set within a world impacted by Tupac Shakur, describing events and experiences in his life during the mid 1990s, such as run-ins with the cops and events that foreshadowed his death."}
{"text":"Growing up together on the same block of their safe neighborhood, Neeka and the narrator have been friends since birth. When D. Foster first moved into a house on their block, her initial impression as unconventional and different had left the two girls in a bit of shock, as well as their mothers hesitant to let them interact with her. However, they then discovered that they both were greatly influenced by Tupac Shakur's music which caused the three girls to gradually develop a lasting friendship."}
{"text":"Later in their teens, Foster opens up to her two close friends about her alcoholic mother who had abandoned her as a child, leaving her in the care of constantly changing foster homes. She also shares with them the news of her biological Mother now wanting her back. However, relating her relationship with her Mother to that of Tupac's and his Mother, Foster realizes that even through the conflicting relationship, there is still love."}
{"text":"The Road to Paris is a 2006 children's fiction chapter book by American writer Nikki Grimes, originally published by G. P. Putnam's Sons."}
{"text":"Paris is a nine-year old, biracial girl who is placed in the foster system. Her white father left the family while she was young, and her mother has problems with alcohol. She and her older brother Malcolm are placed in different homes after running away from an abusive foster family. She is finally placed with the Lincolns, where she faces racism and loneliness, yet also learns what it is like to have a loving family."}
{"text":"The Road to Paris received the Coretta Scott King Award Author Honor in 2007. Kirkus Reviews wrote that Paris's growth was \"perfectly paced,\" even if supporting characters were \"not all perfectly realized.\" Deborah Stevenson at \"The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books\", disagreed, writing that \"the book tells rather than shows and does so episodically, so Paris jerks along from stage to stage without any clear indication of how she gets there.\""}
{"text":"Becoming Billie Holiday is a 2008 book of poetry for young readers by American poet and author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper, originally published by Wordsong. It won an honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2009."}
{"text":"Floyd Cooper created the illustrations in the book using an eraser to make subtractive shapes in paint. He also used other mediums on top that were oil based, all put on with a drybrush technique."}
{"text":"The book was awarded the honorary Coretta Scott King Award in 2009."}
{"text":"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Alexander's central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that \"mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow\"."}
{"text":"According to the author, what has been altered since the collapse of Jim Crow is not so much the basic structure of US society, as the language used to justify its affairs. She argues that when people of color are disproportionately labeled as \u201ccriminals\u201d, this allows the unleashing of a whole range of legal discrimination measures in employment, housing, education, public benefits, voting rights, jury duty, and so on."}
{"text":"Alexander explains that it took her years to become fully aware and convinced of the phenomena she describes, despite her professional civil rights background. She expects similar reluctance and disbelief on the part of many of her readers. She believes that the problems besetting African American communities are not merely a passive, collateral side effect of poverty, limited educational opportunity or other factors, but a consequence of purposeful government policies. Alexander has concluded that mass incarceration policies, which were swiftly developed and implemented, are a \u201ccomprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow\u201d."}
{"text":"Alexander contends that in 1982 the Reagan administration began an escalation of the War on Drugs, purportedly as a response to a crack cocaine crisis in black ghettos, which was (she claims) announced well before crack cocaine arrived in most inner city neighborhoods. During the mid-1980s, as the use of crack cocaine increased to epidemic levels in these neighborhoods, federal drug authorities publicized the problem, using scare tactics to generate support for their already-declared escalation. The government's successful media campaign made possible an unprecedented expansion of law enforcement activities in America's urban neighborhoods, and this aggressive approach fueled widespread belief in conspiracy theories that posited government plans to destroy the black population. (Black genocide)"}
{"text":"Alexander maintains that this \"undercaste\" is hidden from view, invisible within a maze of rationalizations, with mass incarceration its most serious manifestation. Alexander borrows from the term \u201cracial caste\u201d, as it is commonly used in scientific literature, to create \u201cundercaste\u201d, denoting a \u201cstigmatized racial group locked into inferior position by law and custom\u201d. By \"mass incarceration\" she refers to the web of laws, rules, policies and customs that make up the criminal justice system and which serve as a gateway to permanent marginalization in the undercaste. Once released from prison, new members of this undercaste face a \u201chidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion\u201d."}
{"text":"Alexander writes that Americans are ashamed of their racial history, and therefore avoid talking about race, or even class, so the terms used in her book may seem unfamiliar to many. Americans want to believe that everybody is capable of upward mobility, given enough effort on his or her part; this assumption forms a part of the national collective self-image. Alexander points out that a large percentage of African Americans are hindered by the discriminatory practices of an ostensibly colorblind criminal justice system, which end up creating an undercaste where upward mobility is severely constrained."}
{"text":"Alexander states in the book: \"I was careful to define \"mass incarceration\" to include those who were subject to state control outside of prison walls, as well as those who were locked in literal cages.\" The scope of Alexander's definition of \"incarceration\" includes people who have been arrested (but not tried), people on parole and people who have been released but labelled as \"criminals\". Alexander's definition is intentionally much broader than the subset of individuals currently in physical detention."}
{"text":"Darryl Pinckney, writing in the \"New York Review of Books\", called the book one that would \"touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don't know how to face... [Alexander] is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but NJC is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing\"."}
{"text":"Forbes wrote that Alexander \"looks in detail at what economists usually miss\", and \"does a fine job of truth-telling, pointing the finger where it rightly should be pointed: at all of us, liberal and conservative, white and black\"."}
{"text":"The book received a starred review in \"Publishers Weekly\", saying that Alexander \"offers an acute analysis of the effect of mass incarceration upon former inmates\" who will be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, and described the book as \"carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable\"."}
{"text":"James Forman, Jr argues that though the book has value in focusing scholars (and society as a whole) on the failures of the criminal justice system, it obscures African-American support for tougher crime laws and downplays the role of violent crime in the story of incarceration."}
{"text":"The 10th Anniversary Edition (2020) was discussed with Ellen DeGeneres on The Ellen Show on network TV, and reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section on January 19, 2020."}
{"text":"\"The New Jim Crow\" was listed in \"The Chronicle of Higher Education\" as one of the 11 best scholarly books of the 2010s, chosen by Stefan M. Bradley."}
{"text":"\"a.\"The persistently lingering result of the lack of land reform, of the fact that the former slaves were not granted any of the property on which they had long labored (unlike many European serfs, emancipated and economically empowered to various degrees by that time, their American counterparts ended up with nothing), is the present extremely inequitable distribution of wealth in the United States along racial lines. 150 years after the Civil War, the median wealth of a black family is a small fraction of the median wealth of a white family."}
{"text":"\"b.\"According to Ruth W. Grant of Duke University, the author of the book \"Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives\" (Princeton University Press 2011, ), the expediency-based plea bargain process, in which 90 to 95% of felony prosecutions never go to trial, but are settled by the defendant pleading guilty, undermines the purpose and challenges the legitimacy of the justice system. Justice won't take place, because \"either the defendant is guilty, but gets off easy by copping a plea, or the defendant is innocent but pleads guilty to avoid the risk of greater punishment\". The question of guilt is decided without adjudicating the evidence-the fundamental process of determining the truth and assigning proportionate punishment does not take place."}
{"text":"\"c.\"Michelle Alexander suggested in a March 2012 \"New York Times\" article a possible strategy (she attributed the idea to Susan Burton) for coping with the unjust criminal justice system. If large numbers of the accused could be persuaded to opt out of plea bargaining and demand a full trial by jury, to which they are constitutionally entitled, the criminal justice system in its present form would be unable to continue because of lack of resources (it would \"crash\"). This last resort strategy is controversial, as some would end up with extremely harsh sentences, but, it is argued, progress often cannot be made without sacrifice."}
{"text":"I, Tina: My Life Story is a 1986 autobiography by Tina Turner, co-written by MTV news correspondent and music critic Kurt Loder. The book was reissued by Dey Street Books in 2010."}
{"text":"The book details Tina Turner's story from her childhood in Nutbush, Tennessee to her initial rise to fame in St. Louis under the leadership of blues musician Ike Turner which became an abusive marriage, leading up to her resurgence in the 1980s."}
{"text":"The book contains passages from many of Turner's family, friends and associates, among those are:"}
{"text":"The book became a worldwide best-seller when it was released and led to the film adaptation, \"What's Love Got to Do with It\", in 1993 starring Angela Bassett as Turner."}
{"text":"In 1999, Ike Turner released his own autobiography, \"Takin' Back My Name\", which in part is a rebuttal of the image presented of him in Tina's book and the film."}
{"text":"The Other Side is a children's picture book written by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by E. B. Lewis, published in 2001 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. In 2012, the book was adapted into a film by Weston Woods Studios, Inc., narrated by the author's daughter, Toshi Widoff-Woodson."}
{"text":"The narrator and protagonist of the story is Clover, a young African-American girl. She lives beside a fence which segregates her town. Her mother instructs her never to climb over to the other side. Then one summer, she notices a white girl on the other side of the fence. The girl seems to be very lonely and is even outside when it is raining."}
{"text":"Clover decides to talk to the girl on the other side of the fence. Both girls are not allowed to cross the fence, so they simply decide to sit \"on\" the fence together. First, Clover's friends will not let Annie, the girl from the other side, play with them but then all of the girls realize that the fence (a symbol separating the whites and blacks) should not be there."}
{"text":"Drylongso is a 1992 children's book by Virginia Hamilton and illustrator Jerry Pinkney. It is about a farming family who is experiencing a drought and takes in a stranger."}
{"text":"\"School Library Journal\", in a review of \"Drylongso\", wrote \"As in many of her other works of fiction, Hamilton combines myth and realism to create a poignant, powerful tale. .. Pinkney's illustrations are exquisite, expressive, and perfectly in tune with the tone and spirit of the text.\" and concluded \"Despite the occasional seams, this is a fine book.\" \"Booklist\" wrote \"In an understated story of drought and hard times and longing for rain, a great writer and a great artist have pared down their rich, exuberant styles to something quieter but no less intense.\" and \"Publishers Weekly\" called it a \"thoroughly captivating story firmly rooted in the folktale tradition.\""}
{"text":"\"Drylongso\" has also been reviewed by \"Kirkus Reviews\", \"The Horn Book Magazine\", and the \"Smithsonian\"."}
{"text":"The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton is a children's mystery novel, with sinister goings-on in a reputedly haunted house. It was published by Macmillan in 1968 with illustrations by Eros Keith. The novel received the 1969 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery. \"The House of Dies Drear\" is the first book in the Dies Drear Chronicles; the second is \"The Mystery of Drear House\" (1987)."}
{"text":"The story is set in Ohio, in 1968."}
{"text":"Thomas Small is a 13-year old African American boy, who has moved with his family from North Carolina to Ohio. His father is a history professor who has leased the historic home of the abolitionist Dies Drear. The house has been mostly empty for years, and is riddled with hidden passageways that were used to hide escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad. An elderly caretaker, named Mr. Pluto, lives in a cave on the property, which he has converted into a home. There are rumors that the house is haunted by the ghosts of two escaped slaves who were captured and killed, and by the ghost of Dies Drear himself."}
{"text":"After the Darrows are driven off, Mr. Small helps Mr. Pluto catalog the artifacts in the cavern. They agree to keep the secret, at least until the cataloging is done and the collection is ready to show to the historical society. Thomas looks forward to starting school and making friends, possibly including young Mac Darrow."}
{"text":"Library of Congress Subject Headings for \"The House of Dies Drear\" are: African Americans, Mystery and detective stories, Underground Railroad, and Ohio-History."}
{"text":"The film was adapted into the 1984 television film \"The House of Dies Drear\" directed by Allan A. Goldstein."}
{"text":"This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feminist anthology edited by Cherr\u00ede Moraga and Gloria E. Anzald\u00faa. First published in 1981 by Persephone Press. The second edition was published in 1983 by . The book's third edition was published by Third Woman Press until 2008, when it went out of print. In 2015, the fourth edition was published by State University of New York Press, Albany."}
{"text":"The book centers on the experiences of women of color and emphasizes the points of what is now called intersectionality within their multiple identities, challenging white feminists who made claims to solidarity based on sisterhood. Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism. It has become \"one of \"the most\" cited books in feminist theorizing\" (emphasis in original)."}
{"text":"Though other published writings by women of color existed at the time of \"This Bridge\"'s printing, many scholars and contributors to \"This Bridge\" agree that the bringing together of writing by women of color from diverse backgrounds in one anthology made \"This Bridge\" unique and influential. Barbara Smith, a contributor, wrote that Black, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women \"were involved in autonomous organization at the same time that we [were] beginning to find each other. Certainly \"This Bridge Called My Back\" [\u2026] has been a document of and a catalyst for these coalitions.\""}
{"text":"However, even with these aforementioned impacts, many individuals contend that women of color feminisms still remain marginal within women's studies in the United States. Chela Sandoval, in her essay on third-world feminism, writes: \"The publication of \"This Bridge Called My Back\" in 1981 made the presence of U.S. third world feminism impossible to ignore on the same terms as it had been throughout the 1970s. But soon the writings and theoretical challenges of U.S. third world feminists were marginalized into the category of what Allison Jaggar characterized in 1983 as mere 'description.'\""}
{"text":"\"This Bridge\" \"offered a rich and diverse account of the experience and analyses of women of color; with its collective ethos, its politics of rage and regeneration, and its mix of poetry, critique, fiction and testimony, it challenged the boundaries of feminist and academic discourse.\""}
{"text":"Anthologists Moraga and Anzald\u00faa stated in the preface that they expected the book to act as a catalyst, \"not as a definitive statement on Third World Feminism\" in the United States. They also expressed a desire to \"express to all women, especially white, middle class women, the experiences which divide us as feminists ...we want to create a definition that expands what 'feminist' means.\""}
{"text":"Teresa de Lauretis noted that \"This Bridge\" and \"All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies\" (1982) created a \"shift in feminist consciousness\" by making \"available to all feminists the feelings, the analyses, and the political positions of feminists of color, and their critiques of white or mainstream feminism.\""}
{"text":"Cherr\u00ede Moraga, Ana Castillo, and Norma Alarc\u00f3n adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language \"Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos\". Moraga and Castillo served as editors, and Castillo and Alarc\u00f3n translated the text. In 2002, AnaLouise Keating and Gloria Anzald\u00faa edited an anthology (\"this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation\") that examined the impact of \"This Bridge\" twenty years later while trying to continue the discussion started by Anzald\u00faa and Moraga in 1981."}
{"text":"No Disrespect is a 1994 American memoir written by Sister Souljah."}
{"text":"I Put a Spell on You (book)"}
{"text":"I Put A Spell On You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone is the 1992 autobiography by Nina Simone (1933\u20132003), written with Stephen Cleary."}
{"text":"The 192-page book was published February 1, 1992 by Pantheon. It was re-released in a 2003 Da Capo Press reprint edition following Simone's death on April 21, 2003; this edition included an introduction, \"I Know How it Feels To Be Free: Nina Simone 1933\u20132003\", written by Dave Marsh."}
{"text":"Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race is a 2018 picture book by Margot Lee Shetterly with Winifred Conkling, illustrated by Laura Freeman. The picture book is adapted from Shetterly's 2016 non-fiction book \"Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race\"."}
{"text":"\"Hidden Figures\" tells the story of four African-American women mathematicians and the work they did at NASA from the 1940s to the 1960s."}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\" called the \"Hidden Figures\" \"an important story to tell about four heroines.\" Writing for \"School Library Journal,\" Megan Kilgallen said \"Freeman\u2019s full-color illustrations are stunning and chock-full of details, incorporating diagrams, mathematical formulas, and space motifs throughout . . . enhancing the whole book.\""}
{"text":"\"Hidden Figures\" was named a Coretta Scott King Award honor book for illustration."}
{"text":"Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me is a 2017 memoir by Janet Mock."}
{"text":"Published June 13, 2017 by the Atria imprint of Simon & Schuster, \"Surpassing Certainty\" is Mock's second memoir, following her 2014 \"New York Times\" bestseller \"Redefining Realness\". The book's title is an allusion to Audre Lorde, who wrote, \"And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.\""}
{"text":"Following on the discussion of her childhood and adolescence in \"Redefining Realness\", in \"Surpassing Certainty\", Mock describes life in her twenties."}
{"text":"Writing in \"The New York Times\", Jennifer Finney Boylan described \"Surpassing Certainty\" as \"position[ing] its story within a larger history of a struggle for human rights. But Mock\u2019s book is also a work of the heart, much of it focusing on the dissolution of her first marriage, and her journey from a Honolulu strip club to an editor at \"People\" magazine.\" \"Cosmopolitan\" said the book \"should be required reading for your 20s.\" \"Elle\" named to a list of three \"must-read\" books for June 2017."}
{"text":"Coal is a collection of poetry by Audre Lorde, published in 1976. It was Lorde's first collection to be released by a major publisher. Lorde's poetry in \"Coal\" explored themes related to the several layers of her identity as a \"Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.\""}
{"text":"\"Coal\" consists of five sections. While Audre Lorde presents poems that express each part of her identity, race undoubtedly plays a significant role in \"Coal\". A major theme within the volume is Lorde's angry reaction towards racism. For Lorde, expressing anger was not destructive. Instead, Lorde transforms \"rage at racism into triumphant self-assertion.\" She specifically dedicates the book \"To the People of Sun, That We May All Better Understand.\" In addition, another significant part of the volume explores her existence as a lesbian, friend, and a former lover, specifically in the fourth section that consists of one long poem titled \"Martha\" that outlines the recovery of Lorde's former lover after a car accident."}
{"text":"The volume's namesake comes from a poem in the first section titled \"Coal\". It is written in free-verse and first-person. The idea of an identity consisting of several layers is exemplified in this poem. One's true identity is often hidden behind several muddled layers. Lorde alludes toward this concept by her recurrent use of the dual imagery of a piece of coal and a diamond. As the speaker of the poem, Lorde begins by equating herself with a piece of coal."}
{"text":"Part three of the anthology consists of eleven poems. The poems in this section predominantly discuss Lorde's experiences as both a wife and a mother. In the poem \"A Child Shall Lead\" Lorde uses sensory imagery to express her concerns about her son and what will become of him in the future. Another poem \"Paperweight\" describes her frustrations with her heterosexual marriage. Throughout the poem, Lorde likens paper to something that can console her, because she uses it to write her poetry. The poem takes a dramatic turn in tone in the last stanza stating \"or fold them [paper] all into a paper fan \/ with which to cool my husband's dinner.\""}
{"text":"\"Coal\" received generally positive reviews from critics, especially among her peers and other female poets."}
{"text":"The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race is an essay and poetry collection edited by American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Scribner in 2016. The title, \"The Fire This Time\" alludes to James Baldwin's seminal 1963 text, \"The Fire Next Time\"."}
{"text":"The book was published by Scribner on August 2, 2016."}
{"text":"Writing for the \"San Francisco Chronicle\", Imani Perry described Ward's collection as, \"a composition made by someone who is as careful a reader as she is a writer. Ward is attuned to the spirit of this moment and she is its conductor, gifting insight to us all.\" Dwight Garner particularly praised contributions by Ward, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, and Garnette Cadogan, saying their works are \"[e]ach...so alive with purpose, conviction and intellect that, upon finishing their contributions, you feel you must put this volume down and go walk around for a while.\""}
{"text":"The Meaning of Mariah Carey is a memoir by Mariah Carey, released on September 29, 2020. It was written with Michaela Angela Davis and shared previously untold experiences. The book was published by Andy Cohen Books, an imprint of Henry Holt, and is also available in an audiobook format on Audible read by Carey herself. The memoir became a number one \"New York Times\" Best Seller after its first week of release."}
{"text":"Mariah Carey had considered writing a memoir since 2010 when she was pregnant with her twins Moroccan and Monroe. In the two years prior to \"The Meaning of Mariah Carey\"s release, she told stories to co-writer Michaela Angela Davis. The book was first rumored in April 2018, and Carey acknowledged she was working on it during promotional appearances for her fifteenth studio album \"Caution\" (2018). On July 9, 2020, she announced the memoir was complete."}
{"text":"The book includes a preface and epilogue and is divided into four parts: \"Wayward Child\", \"Sing. Sing.\", \"All That Glitters\", and \"Emancipation\". It focuses on Carey's childhood, career, and personal and professional relationships, with less of a focus on events after 2001. Alongside the plot, the inspirations and meanings of many of Carey's songs are explained and are often accompanied by excerpts from them. Chapters occasionally begin or end with lyrics from Carey's songs as epigraphs, and Bible verses are incorporated."}
{"text":"Media outlets noted that men associated with her such as Eminem and former fianc\u00e9 James Packer are absent. Her role as a judge on \"American Idol\" and feud with Nicki Minaj is unrecognized. She explained: \"If somebody or something didn't pertain to the actual meaning of Mariah Carey, as is the title, then they aren't in the book.\""}
{"text":"In December 2020, Carey said she was exploring how to adapt the memoir into a limited series or film. \"The Guardian\" reported in February 2021 that Lee Daniels is working on a miniseries based on the book."}
{"text":"The book received positive reception from critics, general audiences, and Carey's fans alike. Based on 11 reviews, aggregation website Book Marks reported a \"rave\" response to the memoir. Numerous publications listed \"The Meaning of Mariah Carey\" in their rankings of the best music books or celebrity memoirs of 2020, including \"The Atlantic\", the \"Financial Times\", \"The Globe and Mail\", \"The Guardian\", the \"Irish Independent\", \"NME\", \"Pitchfork\", \"Rolling Stone\"\/\"Kirkus Reviews\", \"The San Diego Union-Tribune\", \"The Times\", and \"Variety\"."}
{"text":"Alison filed a lawsuit against Carey with the New York Supreme Court in February 2021 seeking $1.25 million for emotional distress caused by the memoir. She disputes her depiction and says it was used to generate book sales. In the same court the following month, Morgan filed a lawsuit against Carey, Davis, and the publishers for emotional distress and defamation for his portrayal."}
{"text":"Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl"}
{"text":"Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl is a 2003 picture book by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by James Ransome. It is a retelling by Hamilton, in the Gullah dialect, of the classic story of Bruh Rabbit outwitting Bruh Wolf."}
{"text":"\"Booklist\", in a review of \"Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl\", wrote \"In this version of the beloved Tar Baby trickster story, she drew on Gullah folklore from the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Her rhythmic, immediate version is well matched by Ransome's paintings, both cozy and exciting, which extend the fun with beautiful farmland scenes at dayclean (dawn) and daylean (evening) picturing the wily rabbit thief in human clothes repeatedly outwitting the wolf.\" and the \"School Library Journal\" described it as \"meticulously paced, lyrical, hilarious, and a joy to read aloud.\" with \"lush watercolors [that] suit the story perfectly\"."}
{"text":"\"Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl\" has also been reviewed by \"The Horn Book Magazine\", \"Kirkus Reviews\", and \"Publishers Weekly\", and the \"Florida Media Quarterly\"."}
{"text":"It is a 2004 ALA Notable Book for children, and a 2004 CCBC Choices book."}
{"text":"Happiness Becomes You is a memoir published by singer Tina Turner in 2020. Described by the author as \"a very personal book that focuses on the core themes of my life: hope, happiness, and faith,\" it explores details of Turner's life including how she overcame obstacles to achieve happiness and success, and offers Turner's advice on how readers can realize their own dreams. Turner co-authoerd the book with American writer Taro Gold."}
{"text":"Turner described \"Happiness Becomes You\" as a parallel behind-the-scenes story to the HBO documentary film \"Tina\" (2021). The book is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. It was published in North America by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, by Droemer Knaur in Germany, and in the UK and Commonwealth nations by HarperCollins."}
{"text":"\"Happiness Becomes You\" contains eight chapters, plus an introduction and afterword, that span the entirety of Turner's life, beginning with stories about her hometown before her birth, then continues through the adversities she faced in her life and career as she worked her way up to eventually become a world-class performer, and concluding with stories about the author's daily life at the time of the book's completion when she was eighty years of age in 2020. The book's eight chapters roughly coincide with the eight decades of Turner's life."}
{"text":"Throughout the book, Turner provides inspirational advice and spiritual tools for the reader's self-empowerment and fulfillment, and she shares how her favorite Buddhist principles helped her overcome poverty, prejudice, illness, loss, and other personal and professional challenges. A glossy photo insert is also contained in the book, with sixteen rare and\/or never-before-published images of Turner dating from the late 1970s through 2020."}
{"text":"\"Happiness Becomes You\" was selected as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Amazon's editors, and chosen as a recommended gift book by the Amazon Book Review during the holiday season after its release on December 1, 2020."}
{"text":"The book became a global best seller upon its publication, including eight weeks on the Top 20 of the Spiegel best seller list for Germany, Austria, Holland, and Switzerland. It also reached the No. 1 best selling spot in the spiritual-themed book category."}
{"text":"The book received positive reviews from \"Publishers Weekly\", \"USA Today\", \"Variety\", \"People\", \"Library Journal\", \"Vanity Fair\", the \"San Francisco Chronicle\", and received a starred review from the American Library Association's \"Booklist\"."}
{"text":"Turner curated a twenty-two-song playlist soundtrack for the launch of the book called \"Come Up Smiling\", that was published by Graydon Carter's \"Air Mail\" digital magazine and on Spotify. In the accompanying \"Air Mail\" article, she offered her thoughts on the power of music to lift one's spirits. The playlist consists of tracks from eighteen artists, including Mary J. Blige, Beyonc\u00e9, Katy Perry, Andra Day, Jill Scott, Olivia Newton-John, Herbie Hancock, Taro Gold, Marvin Gaye, Janelle Monae and two songs by Turner herself."}
{"text":"Brown Girl Dreaming is a 2014 adolescent novel told in verse by author Jacqueline Woodson. It discusses the author's childhood as an African American growing up in the 1960s in South Carolina and New York. It was awarded the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Coretta Scott King Book Award, and an NAACP Image Award for outstanding literary work."}
{"text":"Jacqueline is born on February 12, 1963, in the city of Columbus, Ohio, and named after her father, Jack. While Jackie\u2019s first year is spent in the North, several trips are made to the South for Mary Ann (her mother) to visit her parents, Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Georgiana, who live in the Nicholtown area of Greenville, South Carolina. The region is segregated and Jackie doesn't understand why she always goes. Her parents' very different feelings about the South cause arguments between them. Eventually, Jack and Mary Ann split up, and Mary Ann and her three children, Hope, Odella, and Jackie, move south to live with Grandpa Gunnar and Grandma Georgiana."}
{"text":"Jackie comes to love Greenville. While racism and segregation exist there, the place is still home to her and her grandparents. They believe in peaceful marches for civil rights. They know that God will bless them for doing the right thing."}
{"text":"Despite the widespread animosity, there are white people in Greenville who are respectful and treat Jackie and her family like actual human beings, rather than dirt. One such woman is the owner of the local laundromat store, who has known Grandma Georgiana for years. Mary Ann, however, wants to move back North. So, she travels to New York City to get settled. Jackie and her siblings stay on with their grandparents, relishing the time they have with them until Mary Ann comes to retrieve her children, with a brand new baby boy named Roman in tow. They move in with Mary Ann's sister Caroline Irby (Aunt Kay), but Aunt Kay dies and the family of five is left alone."}
{"text":"Blanche on the Lam is a mystery novel by author Barbara Neely. \"Blanche on the Lam\" is the first in a series by Barbara Neely. This novel brings to light the intelligence and power of an African-American domestic female worker in the midst of a racist and sexist society. The book won the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery. The series continues with \"Blanche among the Talented Tenth\" (1994), \"Blanche Cleans Up\" (1998), and \"Blanche Passes Go\" (2000)."}
{"text":"\"Blanche on the Lam\" opens in a court room with Blanche being accused of writing bad checks and being sentenced to thirty days in jail to teach her a lesson. She has a small panic attack at the thought of having to spend thirty days in a small jail cell and asks to use the rest room where she ends up fuming over what has become of her life in Farleigh, North Carolina since moving there from New York city. She gave up better pay for the safety of her children and ended being unable to cover the checks she wrote, being accused of writing more bad checks than she had, and being sentenced to time in jail because of it."}
{"text":"There is a disturbance out in the hall and she takes her chance to escape by slipping out of the restroom and making her way to the exit and out into the underground parking lot. She walks quickly out of the area and finds herself in the neighborhood to a job she had got from the Ty-Dee Girls agency she cancelled for that week. Luckily for her the agency has yet to send her replacement and the woman who comes out of the house does not question her about her apparent lateness. She is then brought into the house, instructed to serve lunch, and then be ready to depart the house so they can head to the country."}
{"text":"After lunch Blanche and the family of four drive out to the country house by the sea. That day she learns that one of the family members, Aunt Emmeline, is a drunk or at least that is what she assumes, and is a witness to her Will signing that hands over the control of her nephew, Mumsfield\u2018s, money to his cousins, Grace and Everett. After the signing she learns from Nate, who has worked for the family for many years, that something was not right with the Will signing situation. He does not explain his reasoning but she intends to find out, all the while planning her move to New York, later Boston, to escape the Sheriff and the jail sentence she is running from."}
{"text":"Later, after returning from running errands with Mumsfield, she finds the Sheriff at the country house and thinks she has been caught, but it turns out that Sheriff is there to see Everett. After she has calmed herself she wonders why the Sheriff was there if not for her, and is even more curious when she realizes how much time he is spending at the property. Nate refuses to tell her but Blanche is determined to find out. Aside from that mystery she is sure that Grace and Everett are trying to get hold or at least control of Mumsfield\u2019s money because they have gone through all of Grace\u2019s money."}
{"text":"However, Blanche cannot assume that she is living with a murderer based on what she overheard and witnessed. The same day Nate comes and tells her that he saw someone wearing a pink jacket walking the short-cut route to the place where the Sheriff died. It is obvious he thinks it was Everett. Later that day Everett confronts Blanche about the whereabouts of Nate, and the next day he ends being dead. Killed in a house fire during the night."}
{"text":"Blanche finds clues here and there and eventually learns that the Aunt Emmeline she saw sign the will was an impostor and that the real woman had been killed. After going over the clues she had and looking at what evidence she had already uncovered and seeing Grace again, she realized that she had been suspecting the wrong person of murder all along. Who would have thought sweet, believable, weary, frightened Grace would have been a serial killer?"}
{"text":"She is the central character on \"Blanche on the Lam\". She is a black woman, who is a housekeeper and cook, on the run from a jail term for a minor offense. She hides out as a domestic worker for a dysfunctional white family. According to Mildred Mickle, Blanche is \"a domestic heroine, a very human, compassionate, and honest yet tricky figure.\". Blanche recognizes as an adult that as a black women domestic, she is \"invisible\", however recalling her aunt's wisdom when she was a child, she recognizes the potential power of that invisibility. This power allows her to hide from the law and conduct and cover up her investigations on the Carter family."}
{"text":"He is the white and mentally retarded cousin of Grace. He holds a good amount of power in the novel because he is the designated heir to the family fortune and for that his family plots to cheat him out of the money. Although he is white, he cannot be understood or accepted by his family, \"He exits in a liminal space, somewhere in between black and white.\""}
{"text":"He relates more to Blanche than his own white family because they share a common reality of being misunderstood and denigrated. Additionally, they both see beyond the superficial and discover hidden truths."}
{"text":"She plays the stereotypical white mistress role. She pays little attention to the people she trusts to run her home but hypocritically, it is because she does not see them as individuals. Blanche, however, takes advantage of Grace's ignorance by pretending to be a former employee so that she can get hired even though she has a warrant out for her arrest. She also uses her stereotype as a white gentle woman to deceive and manipulate everyone in the novel."}
{"text":"He serves as a gardener for the Carter family, whom Blanche is working for while in hiding. He acts submissive and quiet in front of Grace, however he drops this stereotypical \"Uncle Tom\" act and reveals himself to be a sharp witted, humorous man. He owes his life to Grace, because he was about to be lynched (before the novel takes place) and twelve-year-old Grace intervenes and saves him. However, he reveals to Grace that this burden of servitude to the Carter family has angered him more than made him grateful. Additionally, Grace, merely sees him as an object to be worked. When Nate is mysteriously murdered, Blanche begins her detective work and works to avenge his death and bring his killer to justice."}
{"text":"He is Grace's husband. He presents himself in the eyes of Blanche as the central villain and is conspicuous from the start of the novel. His former wife mysteriously died, leading him to an inheritance. Blanche suspects the Sheriff to be blackmailing (or as she calls it \"white male\") Everett so that he does not tell Grace he cheated on her."}
{"text":"He is Mumsfield's cousin and the family lawyer. Blanche catches Symington calling in favors to keep Nate's murder committed by one of his family members out of court to avoid a scandal. He tries to bribe Blanche from revealing this scandal by telling her he will get her sentence repealed."}
{"text":"She holds the inheritance in which she planned to pass to Mumsfield. Blanche notes in the novel about Aunt Emmeline that she \"looked like a drunken Little Orphan Annie at eighty, with her frizzy yellow hair and blank, watery eyes.\" Blanche is asked to witness Aunt Emmeline sign over her will to Grace and Everett, striking suspicion in Blanche. It is revealed later in the novel that this woman is an imposter and the real Aunt Emmeline was murdered by Grace."}
{"text":"Following the tradition of many black artist in the 20th century, Barbara Neely uses the mystery\/crime genre to incorporate themes of deception and perception. With the use of Blanche's character as the detective, Neely asks who is the real criminal: master or slave, upper class or the working class, black or white?"}
{"text":"The issues of trust, deception, and perception have long flourished in racial and gender conflicts. Barbara Neely, exposes these issues through the web of mystery surrounding the murders and cheating that surrounds the characters in \"Blanche on the Lam\". Additionally, there is an overall theme of fear of the characters in the novel that is rooted in the distrust between employer and servant. Blanche grows to trust Mumsfield but ridicules this trust for a white employer by calling it \"Darkies Disease\" \u2014 \"where blacks internalize the role of the servant and take on the personal problems of their employers to the detriment of themselves.\"."}
{"text":"Blanche utilizes all three aspects that provide her with invisibility (being black, female, and a domestic servant) and relies on her identity as a \"Night Girl\"- a name a wise aunt gave her when she found Blanche crying because some kids teased her about having a dark, black complexion. Her aunt consoled her by saying:"}
{"text":"\"They jealous 'cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in 'im, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, god dusk. But it's only them that's got night can become invisible. People what got night in 'em can step into the dark and poof...Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not. Shoot, girl, no wonder them kids teasing you. I'm a grown woman and I'm jealous, too!\""}
{"text":"Blanche's aunt gives her a positive conception of dark skin and instead of being ashamed, Blanche utilizes this concept of being invisible in to a powerful liberation. It allows her to move unseen, to discover the Carter family secrets, and ultimately turns her in to a crafty detective who solves all the crime in the novel. Her disguise is a socially constructed one based on her race, gender, and social class, however by turning these into positive tools, she proves to her oppressors that she is not confined or constructed by how others see (or do not see) her."}
{"text":"In \"I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers\", Rebecca Carroll interviews Barbara Neely, and she discusses how she formed Blanche White:"}
{"text":"\"The character of Blanche initially came from a woman I knew in North Carolina who had a look that inspired me to create a heroine in her memory...I knew I wanted her to be representative of who black women are, presently and historically. Both my grandmothers did domestic work...\" \"A cleansing construction: Blanche White as domestic heroine in Barbara Neely's \"Blanche on the Lam\".\"."}
{"text":"According to Elsie Washington in a review for \"Essence\", the novel is considered \"the first mystery by a black woman with a Black woman as the heroine\"."}
{"text":"Neely scored major accolades with her first novel, winning the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards for \"Blanche on the Lam\". She also received an award from the Black Women\u2019s Reading Club for the book."}
{"text":"Starting Over is a 2011 autobiography by American musician and recording artist La Toya Jackson. The book was published by Gallery Books and was released on June 21, 2011. It made \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list for the week ending July 2, 2011."}
{"text":"The book picks up from where her previous autobiography, \"\", left off. It details her abusive relationship with, and escape from, her manager Jack Gordon."}
{"text":"The latter part of the book describes how her brother Michael Jackson confided in La Toya that he feared being killed for his music and publishing estate. In the book La Toya reveals that she feared for Michael's life in the months leading up to his death."}
{"text":"The hardcover version was released on June 21, 2011. The mass market paperback was released on May 29, 2012."}
{"text":"Jackson made \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list for the week ending July 2, 2011. This was her second book to make the list, the first being \"\", which peaked at number 2."}
{"text":"For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide \/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf"}
{"text":"For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide \/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf is Ntozake Shange's first work and most acclaimed theater piece, which premiered in 1976. It consists of a series of poetic monologues to be accompanied by dance movements and music, a form Shange coined as the choreopoem. \"for colored girls...\" tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society."}
{"text":"In December 1974, Shange performed the first incarnation of her choreopoem with four other artists at a women's bar outside Berkeley, California. After moving to New York City, she continued work on \"for colored girls...\", which went on to open at the Booth Theatre in 1976, becoming the second play by a black woman to reach Broadway, preceded by Lorraine Hansberry's \"A Raisin in the Sun\" in 1959. Shange updated the original choreopoem in 2010, by adding the poem \"positive\" and referencing the Iraq War and PTSD."}
{"text":"\"for colored girls...\" has been performed Off-Broadway as well as on Broadway, and was adapted as a book (first published in 1976 by Shameless Hussy Press), a 1982 television film, and a 2010 theatrical film. The 1976 Broadway production was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play."}
{"text":"\"for colored girls who have considered suicide\/when the rainbow is enuf\" is a piece of work inspired by events of Shange's own life. Shange admitted publicly to having attempted suicide on four occasions. In a phone interview conducted with CNN, she explained how she came to the title of her choreopoem: \"I was driving the No. 1 Highway in northern California and I was overcome by the appearance of two parallel rainbows. I had a feeling of near death or near catastrophe. Then I drove through the rainbow and I went away. Then I put that together to form the title.\" The colors of the rainbow then became the essence of the women in the choreopoem."}
{"text":"Shange also explains that she chose to use the word \"colored\" in the title of her choreopoem so that her grandmother would be able to understand it."}
{"text":"The prologue of the choreopoem \"dark phrases\" begins with the lady in brown describing the \"dark phrases of womanhood\". All she hears are screams and promises. Each woman states where she is from, by stating they are outside their respective cities. The lady in brown proclaims that this piece is all for \"colored girls who have considered suicide \/ but moved to the ends of their own rainbows\". The women then begin to sing children's nursery rhymes, \"mama's little baby likes shortnin, shortnin\". Then all the ladies start to dance to the song \"Dancing in the Streets\"."}
{"text":"The lady in yellow says it was graduation night and she was the only virgin. She was out driving around with her male friends who she has known since the seventh grade in a black Buick, laughing about graduation. After a fight breaks out, the lady in yellow and Bobby leave and end up having sex in the back of the Buick. The other ladies start talking about their sexual preferences."}
{"text":"The lady in blue talks about how she used to participate in dance marathons frequently. One night she refused to dance with anyone that only spoke English. Throughout the monologue she intertwines English and Spanish. During this time she discovered blues clubs. She says she became possessed by the music. She ends her monologue by calling it her poem \"thank-you for music,\" to which she states: \"I love you more than poem\". She repeats \"te amo mas que,\" and the other women join her, softly chanting."}
{"text":"The lady in red addresses an ambiguous \"you\" throughout the monologue. She has loved this \"you\" strongly and passionately \"for 8 months, 2 wks, & a day\" without any encouragement. She decides to end this affair and leaves a note attached to a plant that she has watered every day since she met this person."}
{"text":"The lady in orange begins by saying she does not want to write in neither English nor Spanish, but she only wants to dance. She forgets all about words when she starts to dance. She says \"we gotta dance to keep form cryin and dyin\" and the other ladies repeat her words. The lady in orange then claims that she is a poet \"who writes in english \/ come to share the worlds witchu\"."}
{"text":"The lady in blue sets the scene with tubes, tables, white washed windows, and her legs spread open. She couldn't bear to have people looking at her while she got an abortion so she is all alone."}
{"text":"The lady in purple describes Sechita's life in the bayou, while lady in green dances out Sechita's life. She is dressed up for the Creole carnival celebration. She embodies the spirit of her namesake, Sechita, the Egyptian goddess of creativity, love, beauty and filth from the 2nd millennium."}
{"text":"The lady in blue begins her monologue by explaining that she used to live in the world but now only lives in Harlem, and her universe is only six blocks. She used to walk all over the world and now her world is small and dirty. The lady in blue says that when she used to live in the world where she was nice and sweet but now, now she cannot bring herself to be nice to anyone in this \"six blocks of cruelty \/ piled up on itself\"."}
{"text":"The lady in orange discusses a relationship that left her heartbroken. She says that ever since she realized that someone would call a \"colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag\" (56) she has tried not to be that person. She tries to not only give joy, but to receive it as well. She finds herself in what she believes to be a real and honest relationship. Yet, the guy keeps going back to his ex-lover. The lady in orange tried to move on by finding another lover, but she wasn't satisfied. She tried to avoid sadness, but she found herself heartbroken by this man. She could not stand being \"sorry & colored at the same time \/ it\u2019s so redundant in the modern world\"."}
{"text":"The lady in purple speaks about her relationship to dance and men. She deliberately chooses to dance with men who don't speak English, pops pills, and uses dance as an escape from reality. Then she meets a man who she gave everything: dance, fear, hope and scars. She admits she was ready to die, but now is ready to be herself and accept love. She pleads, \"lemme love you just like i am \/ a colored girl\/ i'm finally bein real\"."}
{"text":"The lady in blue proclaims that they all deal with too much emotion and that it might be easier to be white. That way they could make everything \"dry & abstract wit no rhythm & no \/ reelin for sheer sensual pleasure\". The lady in blue states that they should try to control their feelings and she is going to take the first step by masturbating. However, she finds that this makes her feel lonely and doesn't know where to look to feel whole."}
{"text":"The lady in yellow claims to have lost touch with reality because she used to think she was immune to emotional pain, but she realized she is not. She gave her dance, but her dance was not enough. She says \"bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical \/ dilemma \/ i haven't conquered yet\"."}
{"text":"The other women come and each repeats, \"my love is too...delicate\/beautiful\/sanctified\/magic\/saturday nite\/complicated\/music to have thrown back in my face.\" The ladies begin dancing and chanting together."}
{"text":"The lady in green says that someone has taken all of her \"stuff\". She feels that she is the only one that knows and can appreciate the value of her stuff. She describes her stuff as the way she sits with her legs open sometimes, her chewed up fingernails, her rhythm, her voice, her talk, her \"delicate leg and whimsical kiss\". The person who stole her stuff is a man. She made too much room for this man who has run off with her stuff, especially because he doesn't even know that he has it. By the end of the monologue she demands her stuff back from this man."}
{"text":"The ladies start talking about all the apologies they've received from men. Some examples include: he is sorry because he does not know how she got your number, sorry because he was high, sorry because he is only human, and sorry because he thought she could handle it. The lady in blue then declares that she does not need any more apologies. She goes on to say that men should keep their apologies for themselves, because she does not need them to soothe her soul and she cannot use them. Rather than accepting apologies, she is going to do whatever she wants: yell, scream, and break things. And she will not apologize for any of it."}
{"text":"\"for colored girls...\" was first performed by Shange with four other artists at the Bacchanal, a women's bar, outside Berkeley, California. About six months after performing the work in California, Shange and her collaborator, Paula Moss, decided to move across the country determined to perform it in New York City's downtown alternative spaces. At the age of 27, Shange moved to New York, where, in July 1975, the reworked \"for colored girls\" was professionally produced in New York City at Studio Rivbea in 1975."}
{"text":"In 1982 \"for colored girls...\" was adapted for television on WNET-TV, PBS, as part of The American Playhouse series. Although \"for colored girls\" went from a play production to television one, this production was dubbed a \"telefilm\" instead of a teleplay as the performance on WNET-TV was seen as a serious departure from the Broadway production."}
{"text":"In 2009 Tyler Perry announced that he would produce Shange's \"for colored girls who have considered suicide\/when the rainbow is enuf\". The film was the first project for 34th Street Films, Perry's new production company housed in Lionsgate The cast included Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Phylicia Rash\u0101d, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington and Thandie Newton. Originally using the play's full title, the film's title was shortened to \"For Colored Girls\" in September 2010."}
{"text":"In the fall of 2019, The Public Theater revived the play. The production was directed by Leah C. Gardiner, with choreography by Camille A. Brown and featured a Deaf actress in the role of \"Lady in Purple.\""}
{"text":"In 1982 the play was adapted for television on PBS station WNET-TV, as part of the \"American Playhouse\". The adaptation, directed by Oz Scott, was seen as a serious departure from the Broadway production. A review by \"The New York Times\" states: \"What Miss Shange prefers to call a \"choreopoem\" has been expanded into realistic settings that too often resemble the sanitized atmosphere of an episode of \"Good Times\". The net result has been a considerable reduction in the work's emotional impact.\" As a result, the televised production is often seen as a diluted version of the original choreopoem."}
{"text":"On March 25, 2009, the film industry magazine \"Variety\" reported that Nzingha Stewart, a black female director, had acquired the feature film rights to \"for colored girls who have considered suicide\/when the rainbow is enuf\" from Shange and that Lionsgate had signed Stewart to create a screenplay adaptation and direct the film version of the play."}
{"text":"Stewart, at Lionsgate's direction, approached Tyler Perry about producing the film. However, Perry told Lionsgate that if he produced it, he also wanted to write and direct it. Perry then usurped the project from Stewart and scrapped her script. The shift prompted controversy over whether Perry had the skill and consciousness to properly depict an iconic feminist work. Stewart remained on in the token position of executive producer of the film. Among those critics were Oprah Winfrey, who expressed doubts over whether the book should be made into a film at all. Others had reservations based on Perry's position at the helm of such an important book in African American literature, particularly considering the controversies raised by \"\", a film he lent his name to."}
{"text":"On September 3, 2009, Lionsgate announced it had acquired the distribution rights to Tyler Perry's 34th Street Films adaptation of the play, with principal photography originally scheduled to take place in Atlanta, Georgia, in November and December 2009. The film, which was retitled \"For Colored Girls\", was released on November 5, 2010, and was written, directed and produced by Perry. The cast includes Thandie Newton, Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, Kerry Washington, Tessa Thompson, Michael Ealy, Macy Gray and Omari Hardwick. Mariah Carey had also been cast, but pulled out in May 2010, citing medical reasons."}
{"text":"When asked if she held reservations about Perry's adaptation of her work, Shange responded: \"I had a lot of qualms. I worried about his characterizations of women as plastic.\" In reference to the film post-production, she stated that \"I think he did a very fine job, although I'm not sure I would call it a finished film.\""}
{"text":"In addition to receiving several accolades, the play has been described as a landmark piece in African American literature and black feminism. It has since become a cornerstone of black feminist writing and 20th-century drama."}
{"text":"The poster for the play and book (as pictured above) are by the New York-based graphic artist, Paul Davis."}
{"text":"Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality And Intimacy is a 2003 book by Tricia Rose. It comprises 20 oral histories by African-American women from different socio-economic backgrounds and ages telling their stories about various aspects of sexuality."}
{"text":"The \"New York Times\" noted that it is \"the first compilation of black women's oral histories about all aspects of sexuality\" and that it has been applauded by scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., while, in a discussion about her book \"The Politics & Passion\", Gloria Wekker expressed disappointment with \"Longing to Tell\"."}
{"text":"\"Longing to Tell\" has also been reviewed by \"Booklist\", \"Publishers Weekly\", \"Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society\", \"Women's Review of Books, Library Journal, Multicultural Review, and Essence.\""}
{"text":"Luster is a 2020 debut novel by Raven Leilani. The book follows a Black woman in her twenties who gets involved with a fortysomething white man in an open marriage. \"Luster was\" released on August 4, 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received mainly positive critical reception and won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for fiction. In December 2020, the book was found in Literary Hub to have made 16 lists of the year's best books."}
{"text":"\"Luster\" follows Edie, a Black woman in her twenties who lives in New York City and works as an editorial assistant. She meets Eric, a white man in his forties who is in an open marriage. Eric and his wife have a 12-year-old adoptive daughter, Akila, who is also Black. Edie begins a sexual relationship with Eric and moves to New Jersey to live with his family after she gets fired."}
{"text":"Critics noted that the character of Edie is a \"fl\u00e2neur\", which is notable as it is typically a literary position occupied by white male characters."}
{"text":"The book was recommended by various outlets prior to its publication."}
{"text":"\"Luster\" received mostly positive reviews. \"Kirkus Reviews\" described the book in a starred review as \"Sharp, strange, propellant\u2014and a whole lot of fun.\" Mark Athitakis rated the book 3.5\/4 stars and stated in \"USA Today\", \"\"Luster\" isn\u2019t just a sardonic book, but a powerful one about emotional transformation.\" \"Publishers Weekly\" reviewed the book and stated, \"Edie\u2019s ability to navigate the complicated relationships with the Walkers exhibits Leilani\u2019s mastery of nuance, and the narration is perceptive, funny, and emotionally charged.\" Bookpage.com gave \"Luster\" a starred review and wrote: \"Leilani\u2019s writing is cerebral and raw, and this debut novel will establish her as a powerful new voice.\""}
{"text":"Noting that the novel is a debut, Leah Greenblatt of \"EW\" wrote, \"that newness sometimes shows; after a wildly beguiling start, the novel telescopes inward, often forsaking narrative momentum for mood and color. Sentence by sentence, though, she\u2019s also a phenomenal writer, her dense, dazzling paragraphs shot through with self-effacing wit and psychological insight.\" Writing for \"Virginia Quarterly Review\", Kaitlyn Greenidge praised Leilani's \"linguistic skill.\""}
{"text":"Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 nonfiction book written by Margot Lee Shetterly. Shetterly started working on the book in 2010. The book takes place from the 1930s through the 1960s when some viewed women as inferior to men. The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked as computers (then a job description) at NASA, during the space race. They overcame discrimination there, as women and as African Americans. Also featured is Christine Darden, who was the first African-American woman to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service for her work in researching supersonic flight and sonic booms."}
{"text":"The book reached number one on \"The New York Times\" Non-Fiction Best Sellers list and got the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017. The book was adapted as a film by the same name, released in 2016, that was nominated for three Oscars. It received numerous other awards."}
{"text":"\"Hidden Figures\" tells the story of three African-American women who worked as computers to solve problems for engineers and others at NASA. For the first years of their careers, the workplace was segregated and women were kept in the background as human computers. Author Margot Lee Shetterly's father was a research scientist at NASA who worked with many of the book's main characters."}
{"text":"The book explains how these three historical women overcame discrimination and racial segregation to become three American achievers in mathematics, scientific and engineering history. The main character, Katherine Johnson, calculated rocket trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. Johnson successfully \"took matters into her own hands\"; by being assertive with her supervisor; when her mathematical abilities were recognized, Katherine Johnson was allowed into all male meetings at NASA."}
{"text":"The book was adapted as a film of the same name, written by Theodore Melfi and Allison Schroeder, and directed by Melfi. It was released on December 25, 2016 to positive reviews from critics, and received a nomination for Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards. It received numerous other nominations and awards. Taraji P. Henson starred as mathematician Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer played Dorothy Vaughan, an African-American mathematician who worked for NASA in 1949, and Janelle Mon\u00e1e played Mary Jackson, the first female African-American engineer to work for NASA. The movie made 231.3 million USD (United States Dollars). The budget of the film was 25 million USD."}
{"text":"While the film is based on the book, author Margot Lee Shetterly agrees that there are differences between the two, and she finds that to be understandable."}
{"text":"In 2016 a Young Reader's Edition was released for readers ages 8\u201312."}
{"text":"A \"Hidden Figures\" picture book was released in January 2018. The book was co-written by Margot Lee Shetterly for children from four to eight years of age."}
{"text":"The Planet of Junior Brown is a 1971 young adult novel by Virginia Hamilton and illustrator Jerry Pinkney. It is about two boys, Junior Brown and Buddy, who with a school janitor, Mr. Pool, construct a mechanical solar system."}
{"text":"Barbara Bader reviewing \"The Planet of Junior Brown\" in \"Kirkus Reviews\" wrote \"This is not a story to be judged on grounds of probability, but one which makes its own insistent reality; it endures along with its promise long after the story ends.\" and revisiting the book in \"Horn Book\" 40 years later noted that children were not borrowing the book from libraries but wrote \"the human drama will prevail and Junior Brown will continue to find susceptible readers, here and there, to whom it will mean a great deal.\""}
{"text":"\"The Planet of Junior Brown\" has also been reviewed by \"African American Review\", and Literature Arts Medicine Database."}
{"text":"In 1997 a film of the same name, adapted from the novel was released."}
{"text":"The Inheritance Trilogy is a fantasy trilogy written by American author N. K. Jemisin and published by Orbit Books. The trilogy consists of \"The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms\" that won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award; followed by \"The Broken Kingdoms\" and \"The Kingdom of Gods\"."}
{"text":"Yeine is half-Arameri and half-Darr. She is small with curly hair, and can sometimes be taken for a boy. She's the chieftain, or \"ennu\", of the Darre, which is a matriarchal society of warriors (reminiscent of the Amazons), until she is made a potential heir to the Arameri throne and put in charge of three other countries, all of which are bigger than Darre. Because of her bluntness and Darre manners, she is called a barbarian by the Arameri."}
{"text":"Yeine is a resilient, independent woman. She's learned to mask her emotions from the Darre people, but cannot fake friendliness and affection for those she does not like. She loathes the Arameri family, but will use Arameri tactics to protect those she loves. She treats the Enefadeh with respect unlike most of her kinsmen."}
{"text":"Because Enefa's soul is within her body, she can hear the goddess' voice and see visions. Even though everyone, including Nahadoth, expects Enefa's soul to overtake her own, her soul defeats Enefa's and she replaces the goddess with Enefa's blessing."}
{"text":"N.K. Jemisin's character study names her as impulsive and irrational (she obsesses over her mother's murder even when she has other things to worry about), and not above hurting herself to get what she needs."}
{"text":"Nahadoth is the Nightlord, otherwise known as the god of night, chaos, and change. He was the first of the gods to exist. When Itempas murdered Enefa, he led his children in revolt against him, and was forced into a mortal body as a punishment. By day, he is \"Naha,\" a tortured human. By night, however, he is free to become something close to what he once was. Nahadoth is shaped by the thoughts and expectations of those around him."}
{"text":"He is the father of Sieh, and loves Enefa, Itempas and later Yeine."}
{"text":"The god of law, order, light, and rules, Bright Itempas came after Nahadoth and though at first they fought, they later became lovers. He kills Enefa and imprisons Nahadoth and his children, but offers the Nightlord a chance to be free and serve him every time a new Arameri ruler is chosen."}
{"text":"He is worshipped as the Skyfather by the Arameri people, who imposed him on all the peoples they conquered and declared all who remembered Nahadoth and the others as heretics."}
{"text":"The goddess of twilight, dawn, balance, life, and death, she came third of the Three. She was the one who created life. Sieh was her firstborn. From the beginning, Nahadoth delighted in her creations, but Itempas didn't because he disliked change. She loves both Nahadoth and Bright Itempas, and Sieh obviously longs for her to love him like a mother. She seemingly has no choice but to love her children, but is also feared by them. When she is murdered, Itempas keeps a part of her soul, trapped in the Stone, and the rest is gathered and placed into Yeine by the Enefadeh."}
{"text":"The Trickster god, he is the firstborn of Nahadoth and Enefa. A perpetual child, with a child's cleverness and a child's cruelty, he has bright green eyes and a falsely innocent demeanor. Sieh has chosen the path of a child, and therefore despite his age he can't stop loving and longing for a mother. Yeine notices at one point that when he is intent on something, he doesn't blink. In Sky, the Arameri palace, he possesses a room full of multi-colored orbs that are actually a sun and planets stolen from various other solar systems."}
{"text":"The goddess of wisdom, she betrays the Enefadeh's plan to Itempas. She is described as very beautiful, with gold and silver wings, though she takes the form of a plump, old librarian when she first appears to Yeine. Yeine kills her after she replaces Enefa."}
{"text":"The goddess of war and battle, she is huge, and described as taller kneeling than Sieh standing. Like Kurue and Sieh, she is another of Nahadoth's children, and the one to mark Yeine so that she'll be free from Arameri control. Yeine earns her respect after she kills Kurue."}
{"text":"The ruler of the Arameri and Yeine's grandfather, he offered his wife to transfer the Stone to him, which killed her and alienated his daughter, Kinneth. Despite this he continues to love his daughter, and always hoped for her return. In N.K. Jemisin's character study, she reveals that Dekarta blames Yeine for taking Kinneth from him."}
{"text":"One of the potential heirs and a cousin once-removed from Yeine, Scimina is a cruel, half-mad woman with no conscience whatsoever. She sets Nahadoth on Yeine the first time she meets her and threatens to destroy Darre if she isn't named as heir. She sits at Dekarta's right hand at the Council, and is described as \u201ca reedy Amn beauty of sable hair, patrician features, and regal grace.\u201d"}
{"text":"Scimina's younger twin brother and the other potential heir, Relad surrounds himself with his vices. He knows if he aligns with Yeine his sister will kill him."}
{"text":"A half-blood like Yeine, he is the palace steward and a good man who takes care of the servants and cares for Yeine. He was part Amn and part Ken, and gets his red-colored hair from his Ken side. His Amn father was also Relad and Scimina's older brother. T'vril is said to be just as smart as Scimina or Relad. Yeine orders Dekarta to name him heir after she takes Enefa's place."}
{"text":"The palace Scrivener\u2014or scholar of the gods\u2014he claims to have been Kinneth's friend and offers to befriend Yeine. Yeine doesn't trust him, and later figures out that he was her mother's lover and that she used him to learn the truth about her mother's death."}
{"text":"A matriarchal society, Darre is made of tribes and ruled by the \"ennu\", which happens to be Yeine. Darre publicly rescinded their faith in Nahadoth and the Enefadeh when they were conquered by the Arameri, but still worship them in secret. The men in Darre are trophies, and used basically to sire children, though many couples, such as Kinneth and Yeine's father, are deeply in love."}
{"text":"The Darre have a brutal coming-of-age ceremony, in which the young woman has to survive in the forest for a month, and then return home to fight publicly with a man her sponsor has chosen. She will either win and control the sex that follows, or be brutally raped."}
{"text":"Usually, the sponsor chooses a weak man, but because the Darre people don't trust Yeine's Amn blood, her grandmother chooses the strongest warrior. Yeine fights as best she can, fulfills the ceremony, and then kills her rapist with a rock afterwards, effectively claiming her right to rule."}
{"text":"The Darre people are said to have dark skin, straight hair, and lush curves."}
{"text":"The city of Sky is sprawled over a small mountain and completely white. The Palace, which is also called Sky and where the majority of the story takes place, was built by the gods and sits above the earth, floating in the sky. In Sky (the city), there is the Salon, a white-walled building where the Consortium (world council) meets to pretend that they aren't all just obeying the Arameri."}
{"text":"A park built around Sky and the World Tree's base."}
{"text":"Official name for the palace of the Arameri and the city beneath it."}
{"text":"The \"Middle City\" of sky in shadow, situated atop the World Trees roots. Includes, servants, suppliers, and crafters, and the mansions they serve (which encircle the Tree's trunk) by means of a network of steam-driven escalators."}
{"text":"Capital of the largest province of the Teman Protectorate."}
{"text":"The most populous and powerful race, ruled by the Arameri, who indirectly rule the Senmite races by \"advising\" the Nobles Consortium, (world council), and the Order of Itempas (Itempas priests). Though they possess many armies and are a powerful nation in their own right, the reason the Amn people rose to power was largely due to the priestess, Shahar Arameri, who helped Itempas kill Enefa and whose offspring were therefore granted the Enefadeh as weapons."}
{"text":"The Amn people are said to be tall with sable hair."}
{"text":"To the east of Senm, a volcanic archipelago. Easternmost portions of the archipelago were close to the Maroland, and the people of those islands have a markedly different culture, darker skin, and curlier hair than those of the western islands."}
{"text":"Lost continent, once to the southeast of High North. Smallest continent. Climate was subtropical-to-temperate. A place of great beauty and biodiversity; the first humans evolved here, then spread westward. The first Arameri home city was here, before the continent was destroyed by Nahadoth. For several centuries afterward the area where the Maroland had been was prone to underwater earthquakes\/tsunami that made sea travel treacherous. Colloquially called \u201cMaro\u201d."}
{"text":"The origin of all things. The Maelstrom is the force, or entity, that gave birth to the Three. It has never communicated with any of its children, and not even the gods fully understand its nature. Yeine perceives it during her lovemaking with Nahadoth in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as \u201ca sound: a titanic, awful roar.\u201d The gods describe it as a churning storm, not just of energy or matter but of concepts as well. Most godlings, demons, or mortals who approach too closely are torn apart by its raging power."}
{"text":"The creator entities of the Inheritance Trilogy. Gods are equally at home as corporeal or incorporeal beings, are able to travel virtually anywhere in creation, and have complete power over all material and metaphysical objects and concepts. Only three gods exist at the beginning of the trilogy: Nahadoth, Itempas, and Enefa. Enefa was murdered by Itempas, and eventually replaced by Yeine. Individually the gods are extremely powerful, but not omnipotent or omniscient. Only the Three acting in concert have absolute power, rivaled only by the Maelstrom."}
{"text":"Godlings are immortal children of either the Three or other godlings, or some combination thereof. Each has an affinity and antithesis, and all possess the ability to travel anywhere and manipulate matter, including their own bodies. Beyond this, their powers vary widely per individual. Godlings exist in three rankings: niwwah, mnasat, and elontid. In The Kingdom of Gods, Sieh defines the demons as a fourth ranking, but notes that they are all (to his knowledge) dead."}
{"text":"Elontid: The second ranking of godling. The Imbalancers, born of the inequality between gods and godlings or the instability of Nahadoth and Itempas.Sometimes as powerful as gods, sometimes weaker than godlings."}
{"text":"Mnasat: The third ranking of godlings; godlings born of godlings. Generally weaker than godlings born of the Three."}
{"text":"Niwwah: The first ranking of godlings, born of the Three; the Balancers. More stable but sometimes less powerful than the elontid."}
{"text":"Or more specifically, human races. There are many sentient species in the universe, though only one matters for the Inheritance Trilogy. Below are the relevant subgroups of humankind:"}
{"text":"Demons, in the world of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, are the offspring of a mating between gods and humans. They are mortal, like humans, and for the most part resemble humans, though there are some cases of demons bearing visible \u201cdeformities\u201d as a marker of their inhuman heritage. (An example is Oree Shoth's eyes, which are specialized to see magic but incapable of seeing anything else.) Since nearly all mortal humans have gods somewhere in their lineage, the designation of \u201cdemon\u201d refers to degree of godly heritage \u2014 generally only those who are 1\/8th god or greater. Some mortals with more distant godly heritage are also deemed demons if they are throwbacks in some way. They must possess the three traits which mark a demon:"}
{"text":"The discovery of this last trait, the demons\u2019 deadly blood, caused their downfall as the gods then turned on them and hunted them to near extinction. Only a few demon lineages now survive, in secret and sometimes unknown even to themselves. The only known demons at the time of the Inheritance Trilogy include Oree Shoth, her father (deceased), her daughter Glee Shoth, Itempan priest and scrivener Dateh Lorillalia, Shahar Arameri the younger, Dekarta Arameri the younger, and Remath Arameri. Sieh and Itempas also remember Shinda Arameri, Itempas\u2019 first demon child (deceased)."}
{"text":"Little is known of the age before the Demon War \u2014 that period in which they lived and walked freely among the realms. There were possibly thousands of them at the height of this age."}
{"text":"In many cultures demons were hailed as mortal gods due to their great magical abilities. They were generally regarded as more approachable than \u201cpure\u201d gods. In The Broken Kingdoms Appendix 2, Nemue Sarfith Enulai speaks of Yiho of the Shoth Clan \u2014 a daughter of Enefa, and likely an ancestor of Oree Shoth \u2014 who created salmonlike river fish to feed her countrymen during a famine. As a result of this and other boons provided by the demons, many mortals helped to hide their local demons when the gods turned on them. In the Maroland, demons became a special class of bodyguard-historians called enulai, who helped to guard and guide the royal family of the various Maro peoples until the Maroland's destruction."}
{"text":"Most demons were the descendants of Nahadoth via hundreds of mortal men and women, though godlings parented many as well. The goddess Enefa bore comparatively few demon children, as carrying these children made her unwell (a warning of their deadly blood). The god Itempas is known to have fathered only two demons: Shinda Arameri, son of Shahar Arameri; and Glee Shoth, daughter of Oree Shoth."}
{"text":"As of 2019 Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights to the book trilogy and plans on making 3 live action movies."}
{"text":"They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South is a nonfiction history book by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. \"They Were Her Property\" is \"the first extensive study of the role of Southern white women in the plantation economy and slave-market system\" and disputes conventional wisdom that white women played a passive or minimal role in slaveholding. It was published by Yale University Press and released on February 19, 2019. For the book Jones-Rogers received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians."}
{"text":"\"They Were Her Property\" disputes the idea that white women did not play a significant role in slaveholding in the American south. Jones-Rogers uses primary source documents to illustrate the scope and conduct of white women slaveholders, including testimonials of formerly enslaved people archived by the Federal Writers' Project, and bills of sales for enslaved people bought and sold by white women. The author stated that around 40% of bills of sales from South Carolina in the 18th century included either a female buyer or seller."}
{"text":"Jones-Rogers argues that white women were groomed to become plantation mistresses from girlhood through various social norms and often exacted cruelty and sexual violence onto enslaved people. The book addresses the widely-held belief that white women were gentler to enslaved people than white men, and dispels the notion of the \"Jealous Mistress\" who is angry that her husband has sex with enslaved women."}
{"text":"Jones-Rogers contends that slaveholding was a key mechanism for white women to build wealth and maintain financial independence from their future husbands, and they skirted losing enslaved people to their husbands through various legal tools."}
{"text":"spell #7, or \"spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people\", is a choreopoem written for the stage by Ntozake Shange and first performed in 1979."}
{"text":"After the New York run, \"spell #7\" went on to be performed by other companies. Some productions include one in 1982 at Clark College, another in 1982 during the Philadelphia Black Theater Festival, one in 1986 from the Avante Theater Company in Philadelphia, a 1991 performance at the Studio Theatre (Washington, D.C.), and a 1996 production at Spelman College."}
{"text":"The choreopoem was published in 1981 in \"Three Pieces\", a collection of Shange's theater works. In addition to \"spell #7\", the book contains \"a photograph: lovers in motion\" and \"boogie woogie landscapes\", and a foreword written by Shange. \"spell #7\" was also printed in the 1986 anthology \"9 Plays by Black Women,\" alongside works by Beah Richards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Childress, among others. Both of these versions restore the natalie monologue that was cut from the Anspacher performance."}
{"text":"In order of appearance, the characters are:"}
{"text":"Ntozake Shange Papers, 1966-2016; Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College."}
{"text":"Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (PTSS) is a 2005 theoretical work by Dr. Joy DeGruy (n\u00e9e Leary)."}
{"text":"The book describes the multi-generational trauma experienced by African Americans that leads to undiagnosed and untreated posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in enslaved Africans and their descendants. The book was first published by Uptone Press in 2005, with later re-release by the author in 2017."}
{"text":"DeGruy states that Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is not a disorder that can simply be treated and remedied clinically but rather requires profound social change in individuals, as well as in institutions, that continue to reify inequality and injustice toward the descendants of enslaved Africans. DeGruy spent 12 years developing the quantitative and qualitative research for this book. The theory has been generative of subsequent academic work in clinical psychology and black studies."}
{"text":"In addition to forming the basis of public lectures and workshops offered by DeGruy and her contemporaries, the research described in \"Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome\" inspired an eponymous play, which was staged at the Henry Street Settlement Experimental Theater, New York, in 2001."}
{"text":"From Black Power to Hip-Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism is a 2006 book by Patricia Hill Collins. Published by Temple University Press, the book is centered around Patricia Hill and her experiences with racism in America. The book also includes experiences from other Black men and women and their responses to it. In the end she offers her take on Black youth and how its changing along with how Black nationalism works today."}
{"text":"In a review written by Publisher's Weekly, they write \"sociologist Collins (Black Feminist Thought; Black Sexual Politics) turns her eye toward young African American women who have chosen to explore feminism through pop culture instead of academia in this sometimes rousing, sometimes plodding anthology of six essays\"."}
{"text":"Afrikanlibrary.net says \"Using the experiences of African American women and men as a touchstone for analysis, Patricia Hill Collins examines new forms of racism as well as political responses to it.In this incisive and stimulating book, renowned social theorist Patricia Hill Collins investigates how nationalism has operated and re-emerged in the wake of contemporary globalization and offers an interpretation of how black nationalism works today in the wake of changing black youth identity.\""}
{"text":"Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush is a 1982 children's novel by Virginia Hamilton. The novel deals with the paranormal, poverty, single motherhood, childhood illness, and child abuse. The novel, like many of Hamilton's works, is set in Ohio."}
{"text":"Hamilton wrote the novel in two locations \u2014 in Ohio during winter and spring, and on an island in the Caribbean."}
{"text":"Hamilton included the metabolic disorder porphyria in the novel because a close friend suffered from it; the author noted that she had wanted to work the disorder into a novel for two decades before using it in \"Sweet Whispers\"."}
{"text":"Hamilton's opening paragraph format was inspired in part by Truman Capote's short story \"Children on their Birthdays.\""}
{"text":"\"Sweet Whispers\" contains magical realism elements \u2014 the ghost character of Brother Rush appears in an otherwise realistic setting. M'Vy tells Tree that she can see ghosts because of the family's African heritage."}
{"text":"Hamilton explores questions of identity, the supernatural, the need to belong within a family, and encounters with death through a Black American point of view."}
{"text":"The character of M'Vy showcases a complicated motherhood, as she is often away from the apartment (and engaged in abuse of Dab when he was younger.) \"Hamilton has not created a traditional, stereotypic, idealized mother,\" wrote one critic."}
{"text":"Hamilton included the ghost of Brother Rush as a literary device to represent the idea that people carry their pasts with them."}
{"text":"\"Kirkus Reviews\", in reviewing \"Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush\", called it \"One of Hamilton's deeply felt family stories\" and wrote \"like other Hamilton novels this has its rough edges, but they are outweighed here by the blazing scenes, the intensity of Tree's feelings, the glimpses of Dab through her eyes, and the rounded characterization of Vy.\""}
{"text":"Author Katherine Paterson, reviewing the novel in \"The New York Times\", noted \"the last time a first paragraph chilled my spine like this one, I was 16 years old, hunched over a copy of \"Rebecca\".\""}
{"text":"In the \"Interracial Books for Children Bulletin\", Geraldine Wilson wrote that the novel \"is like a thoughtfully designed African American quilt. It is finely stitched, tightly constructed and rooted in cultural authenticity.\""}
{"text":"\"Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush\" has also been reviewed by the \"English Journal\", and the \"School Library Journal\"."}
{"text":"\"Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush\" won the 1983 Coretta Scott King Author Award and the 1983 Boston Globe\u2013Horn Book Award."}
{"text":"The novel was a finalist for the 1983 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and was also a Newberry honor winner."}
{"text":"Movement In Black is a collection of poetry by Black lesbian feminist Pat Parker."}
{"text":"The collection was originally published by Diana Press in 1978. When Diana Press closed in 1979, \"Movement In Black\" went out of print. In 1983, Crossing Press issued a facsimile edition of the collection, though the title was once again unavailable by 1987. Shortly after Parker's death in 1989, Firebrand Books published its first edition of the collection, which included a foreword by Audre Lorde and an introduction by Judy Grahn. Ten years later, Firebrand released \"An Expanded Edition of Movement In Black\", which includes a new section of previously-unpublished work, an introduction by Cheryl Clarke, and \"Celebrations, Remembrances, Tributes\" by ten Black writers including Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, Pamela Sneed, and Barbara Smith."}
{"text":"According to Amy Washburn, \"Movement In Black\" \"emblematizes intersectionality and simultaneity as forms of revolution in struggles of self and society.\" Focusing on \"themes of time and space, marginalization and movement, difference and power, visibility and invisibility, and history and memory,\" Parker used autobiographical writing \"to fuse personal and political sites of resistance.\" Jewelle Gomez states that throughout \"Movement In Black\", as Parker \"was always doing\", she used \"plain language and ritual to valorize the ordinary life experiences of Black women. In doing so she gave others a glimmer of possibility for growth and change.\""}
{"text":"Justice and Her Brothers is a 1978 science fiction novel for young adults by award-winning author Virginia Hamilton. The novel, like many by Hamilton, is set in Yellow Springs, Ohio \u2014 the author's birthplace. It is the first novel of The Justice Trilogy and is followed by \"Dustland\" (1980) and \"The Gathering\" (1981)."}
{"text":"In an article for \"The Horn Book Magazine\", Hamilton explained that Blackness in her works is sometimes significant and sometimes not. In \"Justice and Her Brothers,\" Hamilton noted:\"race has nothing whatever to do with plot and the outcome for the characters. The powers of extrasensory perception, telepathy, and telekinesis the children have are not meant to be peculiarities. They represent a majestic change in the human race.\""}
{"text":"The story is told over one week during a hot summer in Ohio. Protagonist Justice Douglass is dealing with the fact that her mother is attending college and has to spend time away from the home, leaving Justice to the care of her twin older brothers, Thomas and Levi. Levi clearly cares for Justice, both with domestic tasks and emotionally, while Thomas is antagonistic toward Justice."}
{"text":"Thomas has established the Great Snake Race, a competition for the boys in the neighborhood, and Justice prepares by seeking out the snake that is both the largest and the fastest. Concurrently, Justice notices that Thomas seems to be able to mentally control his twin brother Levi. Fear of Thomas brings Justice to the home of Mrs. Leona Jefferson and her son Dorian Jefferson, mother and child. Mrs. Leona Jefferson teaches Justice about her own psychic abilities, both to protect Levi and to practice her own power."}
{"text":"Justice learns that the object of the Great Snake Race is not to actually race snakes but to catch the most. Justice, thinking she will lose, ends up winning over Thomas, as her snake was pregnant and had offspring. After the Race, Thomas probes Justice's mind and tries to control her. Justice and neighbor Dorian battle against Thomas, defeating him. The children then link minds and Justice transports them to the future, briefly, where they learn that as a group, they are the \"first unit,\" a new kind of human."}
{"text":"The novel deals with ideas of loneliness in childhood, the family unit and its affect on children, and identity."}
{"text":"In a review in \"The New York Times\", Jean Fritz wrote that \"the book is like an expertly crafted, highly original painting over which a surrealistic film has been tacked.\" \"School Library Journal\" praised Hamilton's descriptions, noting \"many rich details... are skillfully woven into a complex plot all the more chilling for being so firmly grounded in reality.\" In \"The Junior Bookshelf\", M. Hobbs noted \"[Hamilton] is a Black novelist using racial characteristics in a new, altogether fascinating way.\""}
{"text":"One critic debated the appropriate age of the novel's audience, due to the its complexity. In \"The Christian Science Monitor\", Clive Lawrence wrote \"Is it suitable for 12-year-olds? I have to say no. The average child will find it boringly serious.\""}
{"text":"At the time of its publishing, \"Justice and Her Brothers\" was one of few science-fiction young adult novels featuring Black characters."}
{"text":"The novel was a Coretta Scott King Award honor book in 1979."}
{"text":"Bad Feminist: Essays is a 2014 collection of essays by cultural critic, novelist and professor Roxane Gay. \"Bad Feminist\" explores being a feminist while loving things that could seem at odds with feminist ideology. Gay's essays engage pop culture and her personal experiences, covering topics such as the \"Sweet Valley High\" series, \"Django Unchained\", and Gay's own upbringing as a Haitian-American."}
{"text":"\"Bad Feminist\" was one of two books published by Gay in 2014, the other being her novel \"An Untamed State\"."}
{"text":"The essays in \"Bad Feminist\" address a wide variety of topics, both cultural and personal. The collection of essays is broken into five sections: Me; Gender & Sexuality; Race & Entertainment; Politics, Gender & Race; and Back to Me. In a 2014 interview with \"Time\", Gay explained her role as a feminist and how it has influenced her writing: \"In each of these essays, I\u2019m very much trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse. It just shows what it\u2019s like to move through the world as a woman. It\u2019s not even about feminism per se, it\u2019s about humanity and empathy.\""}
{"text":"The book was noted for its popularity in feminist circles, with the satirical site \"Reductress\" publishing a story about how someone was a bad feminist because they hadn't yet read \"Bad Feminist\". A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's \"Bad Feminist\" for \"Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism,\" an initiative of the feminist journal \"Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society\"."}
{"text":"Children of Blood and Bone is a 2018 young adult fantasy novel by Nigerian-American novelist Tomi Adeyemi. The book, Adeyemi's debut novel and the first book in a planned trilogy, follows heroine Z\u00e9lie Adebola as she attempts to restore magic to the kingdom of Or\u00efsha, following the ruling class kosid\u00e1ns' brutal suppression of the class of magic practitioners Z\u00e9lie belongs to, the maji."}
{"text":"Adeyemi drew inspiration from Yoruba culture and Western fantasy fiction like \"Harry Potter\" and \"\" and from both West African mythology and the Black Lives Matter movement. She has also cited the books \"Shadowshaper\" and \"An Ember in the Ashes\" as primary inspirations. Finally, Adeyemi was also affected by the backlash against the black characters in the film \"The Hunger Games\": she wanted to write a story so good even racists would want to read it."}
{"text":"As in the J.K. Rowlings' \"Harry Potter\" series, Adeyemi wanted to build a complete world, though she did not like when she was called the \"black J.K. Rowling\", preferring instead phrases like \"the new J.K. Rowling\". She worked hard to map the distances between cities and the time it would take a horse and lion to travel between them, as well as reasoning through the logical implications of her creative choices, such as having characters ride big cats. She also had to figure out parallels in her imagined world to issues like skin bleaching, which would not exist in a world without white people. She got help from her Nigerian mother at times for things like naming the spells that involved use of the Yoruba language."}
{"text":"Adeyemi entered Pitch Wars, a competition that matches emerging writers with mentor editors and authors to revise their work before submitting them to literary agents. She came to be represented by Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson of ICM Partners. In 2017, publishing rights to \"The Children of Blood and Bone\" sold as a trilogy to include two more books, and rights to the film adaptation sold to Fox 2000. Reportedly these deals came to seven figures, with \"Deadline\" describing it as \"one of the biggest YA debut novel publishing deals ever.\" Adeyemi was 23 at the time."}
{"text":"\"Children of Blood and Bone\" was published on March 6, 2018, by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers after being called \"the biggest fantasy debut novel of 2018\" and one of the most anticipated books of the year. A sequel, \"Children of Virtue and Vengeance,\" was published in December 2019."}
{"text":"The trio finds themselves in Ibeji, where the sunstone is used as a prize for deadly aquatic arena games. They agree to compete and Z\u00e9lie uses her powers to win the sunstone. Now in possession of all three artifacts, the group continues on their way until Inan catches up to them. In the chaos that follows, Tzain and Amari are captured in the forest by an unknown group. Inan agrees to help Z\u00e9lie rescue their siblings. During the rescue, they learn that the group is really a settlement of div\u00eeners, some of whom have had their powers reawakened when they were exposed to the scroll before it was taken by the King's forces."}
{"text":"Unable to repair the scroll, Z\u00e9lie uses blood magic and an incantation of her own devising to complete the ritual, which apparently kills her in the process. Z\u00e9lie is then able to speak with her mother, speaking on behalf of the gods in the afterlife, who praises her and sends her back. The book concludes as Z\u00e9lie learns that Amari now has magic."}
{"text":"The novel also tells a more intimate story as children struggle to win their parents' approval. Inan wants to fulfill his duty to his father and kingdom in order to be a good prince, but is also a maji himself and has a personal connection to other maji through Z\u00e9lie. The complexity of teenagers who are eager to jump into the adult world and adult problems is also present in the novel as adolescents attempt to discover themselves. While they struggle with the weight of these obligations, the point-of-view characters in the book are able to demonstrate wisdom, courage and compassion beyond that of the adults they are seeking to please."}
{"text":"Ultimately, it's the female characters who survive trauma and show the way forward. While Z\u00e9lie initially mistakes Amari as weak, it becomes clear Amari has learned other coping strategies while surviving under her abusive father. There is a great deal of loss in the book, with several characters, including Inan, dying, but Z\u00e9lie and Amari continue in their efforts."}
{"text":"In 2018, the viewers of \"The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon\" selected \"Children of Blood and Bone\" as the first ever \"Tonight Show Summer Read\". Adeyemi later appeared as a guest on the \"Tonight Show\" on July 24, 2018 to discuss the book."}
{"text":"The Stars and the Blackness Between Them"}
{"text":"The Stars and the Blackness Between Them is an American young adult fiction book by Junauda Petrus. It was released on September 17, 2019 by Dutton Books, and tells the story of two teenage girls who build a relationship, as one acclimates to life in Minneapolis after moving from Trinidad, and the other battles an illness. \"The Stars and the Blackness Between Them\" received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award."}
{"text":"In February 2021, Junauda Petrus announced that a film adaptation is in development."}
{"text":"16-year-old Audre lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad. At the urging of her mother, she attends church, but forms a romantic relationship with the pastor's granddaughter, Neri. After they are caught engaging in sexual activity, Audre is sent to live with her father in Minneapolis, where she meets Mabel. Mabel is questioning her own sexuality, and the two become friends. As they prepare for the upcoming school year, Mabel finds out she has a life-threatening illness. Audre supports Mabel as she undergoes treatment, both emotionally and through healing practices she has learned from her grandmother."}
{"text":"2019, United States, Dutton Books, , 17 September 2019, Hardback."}
{"text":"Kimani Press was formed by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd. in December 2005, with the purchase of the Arabesque, Sepia, and New Spirit Imprints from BET Books. Arabesque was the first line of original African-American romance novels from a major publishing house, and published two single-titles each month until it ceased publication in February 2015. The Sepia imprint featured commercial women\u2019s fiction, and New Spirit served the growing African-American inspirational marketplace with both fiction and non-fiction releases."}
{"text":"In July 2006, Harlequin launched Kimani Romance, the only African-American series imprint in the marketplace today, with four new releases each month. In May 2017, it was announced that Harlequin was no longer acquiring titles for the Kimani Romance imprint, with the final titles due to be released in 2018."}
{"text":"In February 2007, Kimani TRU was launched targeting a young-adult, multi-cultural audience with one new release each month. This line ceased publication in October 2014."}
{"text":"Since 2005, Kimani Press novels have been available in eBook format, a portable downloaded alternative to the standard paperback."}
{"text":"The name 'KIMANI' is of Kikuyu Origin."}
{"text":"Arabesque: The leading line of African-American romances. An-award-winning imprint of traditional and contemporary romance novels written by African-American authors. The last title was released in February 2015."}
{"text":"Kimani Romance: Series romance. The last title will be released in 2018."}
{"text":"Kimani Tru: Young-adult fiction featuring African-American youth. The last title was released in October 2014."}
{"text":"Kimani Press Special Releases : Special Releases from favorite Kimani Press authors. The last title was released in January 2015."}
{"text":"Show Way is a 2005 children's picture book by American author Jacqueline Woodson with illustrations by Hudson Talbott. The book was made into a film in 2012 by Weston Woods Studios, Inc., narrated by the author. It recounts the stories of seven generations of African-Americans and is based on the author's own family history. \"Show Way\" was a John Newbery Medal Honor Book in 2006."}
{"text":"Woodson has received numerous awards for her middle-grade and young adult books, which include being a National Book Award Finalist and winning the Coretta Scott King Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Miracle's Boys."}
{"text":"Critics have many good things to say about \"Show Way\". Barbara Z Kiefer and Dennis Price say that \"\"Show Way\" is an exquisite patchwork of words and images.\" \"Publishers Weekly\" stated that \"Show Way\" is \"Both historical and deeply personal.\" \"Black Issues Book Review\" said that \"Show Way\" was, \"Beautifully written and a treat for the eyes.\" Mary N. Oluonye of \"School Library Journal\" stated that \"Show Way\" is \"An outstanding tribute, perfectly executed in terms of text, design, and illustration.\" \"Kirkus Reviews\" says that \"Show Way\" \"Takes a difficult subject and makes it accessible to young readers. One of the most remarkable books of the year.\""}
{"text":"The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales is a 1985 collection of twenty-four folktales retold by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. They encompass animal tales (including tricksters), fairy tales, supernatural tales,and tales of the enslaved Africans (including slave narratives)."}
{"text":"A review by the \"School Library Journal\", stated: \"The well-known author here retells 24 black American folk tales in sure storytelling voice. ... All are beautifully readable.\" and concluded \"With the added attraction of 40 bordered full- and half-page illustrations by the Dillons wonderfully expressive paintings reproduced in black and white this collection should be snapped up.\""}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" review by Ishmael Reed called \"The People Could Fly\" \"extraordinary and wonderful\", commended Hamilton for writing \"these tales in the Black English of the slave storytellers\" and found it \"Handsomely illustrated\"."}
{"text":"\"The People Could Fly\" has also been reviewed by \"Publishers Weekly\", \"Booklist\", Common Sense Media,"}
{"text":"\"The People Could Fly\" has received a number of awards including:"}
{"text":"The Middle-Atlantic Writers Association (MAWA) is a non-profit organization made up of creative writers, scholars, critics, and literature enthusiasts. Founded in 1982, MAWA aims to preserve, perpetuate and study the literary traditions of the Middle-Atlantic region, with a specific focus on the literature of African Americans, the Black Diaspora, women and the multicultural, global community. MAWA aims (1) to provide a forum and publishing outlet for blossoming and established writers from the region and (2) to generate scholarship about writers and subjects from the region, as well as other neglected aspects of literature."}
{"text":"Drama High is an ongoing series of young adult fiction novels written by the American author L. Divine. The series comprises 19 novels and follows the main character, Jayd Jackson through her life in Los Angeles, California as she struggles to balance school, friendships, family, and all the drama that comes with them. The novels contain an element of speculative fiction as the main character comes from a long line of voodoo priestesses and is a priestess in training. The first fourteen books were published through Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Books. Starting in 2012 Divine began self-publishing the series under Ebb & Flow Publications\/L. Divine Inc."}
{"text":"Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment is a non-fiction book written by Michael Javen Fortner."}
{"text":"A look into the role of how America's drug policies impact African Americans and crime in their own neighborhoods."}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" said in a review of the book, \"The history of black people\u2019s ability to express and to act on their punitiveness \u2014 to be tough on crime \u2014 is at the heart of a fascinating though severely flawed new book by Michael Javen Fortner.\""}
{"text":"Aaron Freeman (born June 8, 1956) is an American journalist, stand-up comedian, author, cartoonist, and blogger."}
{"text":"During the 1990s, Freeman was host of the weekly informational radio program \"Metropolis\" which was broadcast in the Midwest. He is also a commentator on NPR's flagship news program, \"All Things Considered\". Freeman co-wrote and directed the stage comedy \"The Arab\/Israeli Comedy Hour\". As a stand up comedian, he is a member of the quartet the Israeli\/Palestinian Comedy Tour. Freeman has performed with The Second City and performs with the Second City Theater."}
{"text":"Along with long-time friend and collaborator Rob Kolson, he created the long-running political and financial comedy \"Do the White Thing\" and its sequel \"Gentlemen Prefer Bonds\"."}
{"text":"In 1983, Freeman created and performed the satire \"Council Wars\", which was based on the Chicago City Council when Harold Washington was mayor. For ten years, he hosted the television talk show \"Talking with Aaron Freeman\". He later hosted and was chief science correspondent for Chicago Public Television's science and technology program \"Chicago Tomorrow\"."}
{"text":"Freeman performs his one-man shows \"News Today\/Comedy Tonight\" and \"Kosher Chitterlings\" for business groups, Jewish groups, colleges, and associations throughout the United States."}
{"text":"Freeman was born in Kankakee, Illinois, and is a longtime resident of the Chicago area. He is a convert to Judaism from Roman Catholicism. He is married to artist Sharon Rosenzweig, with whom he collaborates on projects including the comic strip \"The Comic Torah\". He has twin daughters, Artemis and Diana, who were featured with Aaron on \"This American Life\" episode 17 \"Name Change \/ No Theme\", recorded during a trip to Chicago's Navy Pier."}
{"text":"Tritobia Hayes Benjamin (October 22, 1944 \u2013 June 21, 2014) was an American art historian and educator. She began teaching in 1970 as professor of Art History at Howard University, College of Fine Arts, specializing in African-American art History and American art. Benjamin became the Associate Dean of the Division of Fine Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, and had served as Gallery Director."}
{"text":"She was born on October 22, 1944, in Brinkley, Arkansas, to mother Addie (n\u00e9e Murph) and father Wesley E. Hayes, Sr. She attended secondary school at Horace Mann High School, where she graduated with honors. She went on to attend Howard University, where she met her husband, Donald S. Benjamin, a graphic artist and community activist."}
{"text":"Benjamin wrote the book \"The Life and Art of Lois Mailou Jones\", published by Pomegranate Artbooks, and had published over 20 articles and exhibition catalog essays including \"Profiles of Eleven African-American Artists\" and \"The Image of Women in the Work of Charles White\", \"Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox\", an exhibition she also co-curated."}
{"text":"Benjamin received honors and awards for her scholarship including the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010; the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship-in-Residence award; and also from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellowship for Faculty of Historical Black Colleges."}
{"text":"Alma Jean Billingslea (born 1946) is an American scholar and teacher, and a veteran of the civil rights movement."}
{"text":"Billingslea was born in Albany, Georgia, but grew up in Orange, New Jersey, where she was one of the first African American students to desegregate the Orange public school system. From 1967 to 1971, she worked as a field staff member for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization founded by Martin Luther King, Jr. She is professor emerita and co-founder of the program in African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She received the A.B. degree from Rutgers University, the M.A. degree from Atlanta University, and the PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas."}
{"text":"Billingslea is the author of \"Crossing Borders through Folklore: African American Women's Fiction and Art\" (University of Missouri Press, 1999)."}
{"text":"Tracy Clayton (born c. 1982\/1983) is an American writer known as the co-host of the BuzzFeed podcast \"Another Round\", which has been on hiatus since 2017. Her work has been recognized by \"Fast Company\", \"Ebony\", and \"The Root,\" who described her as \"a superstar at BuzzFeed, the millennial-driven media powerhouse where she writes big, funny things.\" Clayton was laid off from BuzzFeed in September 2018 amid company-wide downsizing. She hosts the Netflix podcast \"Strong Black Legends\", for which she interviews African Americans in the entertainment industry."}
{"text":"Clayton was raised in Louisville, Kentucky and received her bachelor's degree from Transylvania University in Lexington."}
{"text":"Before joining BuzzFeed full-time in 2014, Clayton wrote for \"Madame Noire\", \"Uptown Magazine\", \"The Urban Daily\", \"PostBourgie\" and \"The Root\". She developed the popular Tumblr, \"Little Known Black History Facts\", now a feature on \"Another Round\"."}
{"text":"She was named the Ida B. Wells Media Expert-in-Residence at Wake Forest University's Anna Julia Cooper Center from 2016\u20132017."}
{"text":"Clayton and her co-worker Heben Nigatu launched the first episode of \"Another Round\", produced by BuzzFeed, on March 25, 2015. The show received positive critical acclaim. \"The A.V. Club\" described Clayton and Nigatu as \"passionate and sharp in their distinct points of view.\" It was named to \"Best of 2015\" lists by iTunes, \"Slate\", \"Vulture\", and \"The Atlantic\"."}
{"text":"Clayton announced she had been laid off by BuzzFeed on September 19, 2018, along with most of the other staffers who had worked on BuzzFeed's original podcasts."}
{"text":"On February 11, 2019, Netflix's Strong Black Lead initiative announced it was launching a new podcast featuring interviews with legendary Black members of Hollywood, called \"Strong Black Legends\", to be hosted by Clayton. The first podcast premiered on February 12, 2019 and Lynn Whitfield was the guest."}
{"text":"Clayton also hosts the interview podcast \"Going Through It\" launched by Mailchimp in July 2020, featuring 14 prominent Black women."}
{"text":"In August 2020, \"Back Issue\" debuted, a podcast hosted by Clayton and Josh Gwynn. \"Back Issue\" is produced by Pineapple Street Studios and looks back at formative moments in pop culture. Clayton and Gwynn formerly worked together on the Netflix podcast, \"Strong Black Legends\"."}
{"text":"As of at least March 2017, Clayton lives in Brooklyn."}
{"text":"Marquetta L. Goodwine is an author, preservationist, and performance artist who serves as Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah\/Geechee Nation."}
{"text":"Goodwine is a native of St. Helena Island, South Carolina. She attended Fordham College at Lincoln Center and double majored in computer science and mathematics. In 1996 she left Fordham and the founded of the Gullah\/Geechee Sea Island Coalition. In 1999 she became the first Gullah to speak before the United Nations, giving testimony at an April 1 hearing of the Commission on Human Rights in Switzerland. She participated in the United Nations Forum on Minority Rights which was first established in 2008. At the forum, Queen Quet recorded the human rights struggle of the Gullah\/Geechee people for archival by the United Nations."}
{"text":"On 2 July 2002 Goodwine was elected and enstooled as \"Queen Quet, chieftess of the Gullah\/Geechee Nation.\" Goodwine also serves as the Chair of the Gullah\/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor General Management Plan and Expert Commissioner for South Carolina. She is a member of the 15-person commission established by the United States Gullah\/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act which was passed by the United States Congress."}
{"text":"Goodwine is a public advocate for the Gullah\/Geechee Sea Islands in the face of increasing storm damage resulting from the climate crisis as well as ongoing flooding due to over-development and poor infrastructure maintenance. Her work includes advocating and the preservation of Gullah\/Geechee cultural traditions and resources that are threatened due to gentrification and climate change."}
{"text":"Goodwine served as a consultant for the 2000 Mel Gibson film \"The Patriot\", which featured scenes set on the South Carolina coast of the Gullah\/Geechee Nation. She has been an advisor to several historic documentaries, including \"This Far by Faith: The African American Religious Experience\", \"The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow\", \"Slavery and the Making of America\", \"Reconstruction: The Second Civil War\", and \"The Will to Survive: The Story of the Gullah\/Geechee Nation\". She also lectures throughout the world."}
{"text":"She is the founder of a historic presentation troupe \"De Gullah Cunneckshun,\" which has recorded several CDs and been featured on films and film soundtracks."}
{"text":"Marvelyn Brown (born May 7, 1984) is an African-American author and AIDS activist. She is the founder of Marvelous Connections, an HIV\/AIDS organization founded in 2006. She wrote the autobiography \"The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive\", which tells her story as a young heterosexual woman living with HIV. She has delivered public speeches and made public appearances in the United States, Bermuda, Canada, Jamaica, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, South Africa, Tanzania, and Rwanda."}
{"text":"Brown was born on May 7, 1984, in Nashville, Tennessee. She describes in her autobiography that she had regular clashes with her mother, but the two have since reconciled. She has two half-siblings with whom she keeps in contact, but has not actually met them in person due to them living across the country from her."}
{"text":"On October 3, 2008, Brown posted to her blog that she had been accused of glorifying her illness. \"I am constantly being accused of glamorizing AIDS. Really? There is nothing glamorous about taking 7 horse pills that still make me gage [\"sic\"] after 4 1\u20442 years taking them. I contracted a 100% PREVENTABLE disease, people, which that is my message, not how glamorous I look doing it!\""}
{"text":"Two days earlier, she elaborated on why she had written \"The naked Truth\", adding, \"I wrote \"The Naked Truth\" because I wanted people to get the full story and not a sound bite or the one-hour preping speaking engagement. Most people can\u2019t identify with who I am now because I am HIV-Positive but they can identify with who I was before. That is what makes me relate and shows people that I am just like them. This virus is real and just because you are ignorant or uneducated about HIV that does not make you immune. That is why I wrote \"The Naked Truth\". I can\u2019t be everywhere but my story can.\""}
{"text":"Brown continues to write and has dedicated her life to HIV\/AIDS awareness. She has joked in the past that she will produce a sequel to \"The Naked Truth\" in the future, titled \u201cThe Naked Truth: Wife, Mother, and Still HIV Positive.\u201d She lives in New York City, New York."}
{"text":"Edward Earl Cleveland (March 11, 1921 \u2013 August 30, 2009) commonly known as E. E. Cleveland was an author, civil rights advocate and evangelist of the Seventh-day Adventist Church."}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland was born in Huntsville, Alabama on March 11, 1921 and died at the Huntsville Hospital on August 30, 2009 following an illness. He was married to Celia Marie Abney Cleveland on May 29, 1943 until her death in 2003."}
{"text":"They have one son, Earl Clifford Cleveland."}
{"text":"He preached his first sermon at the age of 6."}
{"text":"At the age of 13 he was the Sabbath School secretary at his local church in Chattanooga, Tennessee."}
{"text":"In the course of his work he traveled extensively, visiting over 67 countries."}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland served the Seventh-day Adventist Church for over 67 years in active and post-retirement ministry. His positions included:"}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland was a very successful evangelist holding over 60 campaigns in 6 continents and training over 1,000 pastors."}
{"text":"He was a Seventh-day Adventist church pioneer of the concept of evangelism in large cities and held national campaigns before satellite technology become common."}
{"text":"In what has been called one of the most successful evangelistic campaigns in Adventist history Cleveland was the first Seventh-day Adventist to baptize more than 1,000 people in a single campaign."}
{"text":"Held in 1966 in Port of Spain, Trinidad the series was housed in two large tents pitched side by side and opened with 3,300 people in attendance, swelling to 7,000 by the final service."}
{"text":"In his campaigns, Cleveland baptized approximately 16,000 persons, including George Juko, the Crown Prince of Uganda. Many churches have been founded as a result of his campaigns. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Rosa Parks are said to have attended his services in Montgomery."}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland was a long-time civil rights activist."}
{"text":"He organized the N.A.A.C.P chapter for students on the campus of Oakwood College."}
{"text":"As a black evangelist, he encountered difficulties related to racism."}
{"text":"In 1954 in Montgomery, Alabama police patrolled his tent meetings after being reported in violation of Alabama ordinances prohibiting whites and blacks to comingle in a public meeting. Cleveland had insisted that these ordinances need not be obeyed."}
{"text":"He participated in the first March on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and secured an 18-wheel tractor-trailer that served as a supply base for blankets and clothing."}
{"text":"He was a member of the Washington, D.C. branch of the Organizing Committee of the Poor People's Campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference dating back to 1968."}
{"text":"Cleveland was twice the speaker for the South Florida S.C.L.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrations in 1986 and 1987 and was credited by the local Director of the S.C.L.C. with helping the branch get a street named for Dr. King in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has conducted Feed The Hungry programs in over 20 cities in the United States. Cleveland also helped to set up a feeding depot in Washington, D.C. for the relief of the hungry during the civil disturbance that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland was a co-founder and member of the Human Relations Committee of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. He was a member of the Flying Squad, a special unit of the church to investigate racial injustices and recommend action. In 1968, he became the first black to receive an honorary doctorate from Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution."}
{"text":"Cleveland was the first African American church leader sent to Asia (excluding India), Europe, South America and Australia. On February 25, 1993, Cleveland was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. collegium of preachers and scholars at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia."}
{"text":"E. E. Cleveland authored 16 published books."}
{"text":"Cleveland was an Associate Editor for \"Ministry\", a monthly religious journal; contributing editor to \"Message\" magazine; contributing writer to \"Signs\", \"Adventist Review\", \"These Times\" and was a columnist to \"The North American Voice\" a monthly religious journal."}
{"text":"Cleveland's life has been the subject of a biography \"E. E. Cleveland: Evangelist Extraordinary\" by Harold Lee with Monte Sahlin."}
{"text":"His autobiography is titled \"Let the Church Roll On\"."}
{"text":"The Bradford-Cleveland-Brooks (BCB) Leadership Center at Oakwood University which opened in October 2007 is in part named for E. E. Cleveland."}
{"text":"It houses a training center for evangelists and ministers as well as provides additional classroom space for the Department of Religion and Theology. This building is also home to the classes for the first master's degree program for the university (Master of Arts degree in Pastoral Studies)."}
{"text":"In November 2007 Cleveland donated his collection of personal manuscripts, sermons and papers to the Center for Adventist Research at Andrews University. This collection of nearly 2000 sermon manuscripts, hundreds of pictures, personal books and audio-visual materials has been termed \"priceless\" and is available to researchers."}
{"text":"Michael Bernard Beckwith is a New Thought minister, author, and founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Beverly Hills, California, a New Thought church with a congregation estimated in excess of 8,000 members. Beckwith was ordained in Religious Science in 1985."}
{"text":"Beckwith is founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center, co-founder of the Association for Global New Thought, and co-chair of the Season for Nonviolence along with Arun Gandhi."}
{"text":"In 1986, he founded the Agape International Spiritual Center, a transdenominational community which today counts a membership of 9,000 individuals who study and practice New Thought\u2013Ancient Wisdom. Agape's outreach programs feed the homeless, serve incarcerated individuals and their families, advocate the preservation of the planet's environmental resources, and globally build and support orphanages whose children have survived the ravages of war and AIDS."}
{"text":"Beckwith was one of the featured teachers in \"The Secret\" (2006) movie and the bestselling book by the same name that followed the film."}
{"text":"Beckwith teaches meditation, affirmative prayer, and speaks at conferences and seminars. He is the originator of the Life Visioning Process, a technique purporting to offer its practitioners a method for putting a stop to being a passive tourist in one's life. He is author of \"Spiritual Liberation\", which won the Gold Medal Nautilus Book Award, \"Inspirations of the Heart\", which was a Nautilus Book Award finalist; \"Forty Day Mind Fast Soul Feast\"; \"A Manifesto of Peace\"; and \"Living from the Overflow\". In 2011, Beckwith released TranscenDance, a collection of remixed lectures set to electronic dance music by Stephen Bray and John Potoker. Beckwith was named to Oprah's \"SuperSoul100\" list of visionaries and influential leaders in 2016."}
{"text":"Beckwith briefly appears in episode 4 of the UK Channel 4 television series \"How to Rob a Bank\" with a segment of his stage show and interview, describing how his inspirational talk led former US Marine Cain Dyer to hand himself in after committing 100 bank robberies."}
{"text":"Abdullah H. Abdur-Razzaq (December 20, 1931 \u2013 November 21, 2014) was an African-American activist and Muslim known for being one of Malcolm X's most trusted associates. Born James Monroe King Warden, he was known as James 67X when he belonged to the Nation of Islam and James Shabazz in the years after he left the organization."}
{"text":"James Monroe King Warden was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the impoverished Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, from which he graduated with honors. He enrolled in the City College of New York but transferred to Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania, after a year. He soon left that school as well to join the Army. Following his discharge, he returned to Lincoln and graduated with honors in English in 1958. He received a master's degree from Columbia University."}
{"text":"In 1958, Warden joined the Nation of Islam at Mosque No. 7, on 102 West 116th Street in New York City, under Minister Malcolm X. As was the custom among Nation of Islam members, he abandoned the surname of Warden as a vestige of chattel slavery and became the 67th James in Mosque No. 7."}
{"text":"By 1960, he had been promoted to lieutenant in the Fruit of Islam, subordinate to Captain Joseph X. Gravitt (later known as Yusuf Shah). Subsequently, he was appointed circulation manager for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut of \"Muhammad Speaks\", and answered directly to Malcolm X."}
{"text":"After the split between Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X formed Muslim Mosque, Inc. and appointed James, then still known as James 67X, secretary of the organization, as well as captain of the men. Based on Malcolm X's instruction, he took the name James Shabazz."}
{"text":"Brother James, as he was sometimes referred, was also responsible for the formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a secular organization that Malcolm X had also formed, patterned after Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's Organisation of African Unity, and through which Malcolm X intended to charge the United States with violating the human rights of its chattel slave descendants."}
{"text":"Shabazz was a constant and willing aide to Malcolm X, in his capacity as head of Muslim Mosque, Inc. and as head of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He remained with, and vigorously assisted Malcolm X until the leader's murder on February 21, 1965."}
{"text":"Abdur-Razzaq spent the years following Malcolm X's murder raising a family and co-founding Al-Karim School (which would later become Brooklyn's famed Cush Campus Schools) with Ora Abdur-Razzaq. He later moved to Guyana, where he worked as a farmer. Returning to the U.S. in 1988, he earned a nursing degree, and he worked in as a nurse until his retirement in 2004."}
{"text":"In his later years, Abdur-Razzaq's work as staff consultant for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was invaluable in cataloging rare photographs, letters and accounts of Malcolm X's life and times. Furthermore, his expertise was widely solicited by journalists, authors, film makers and educators. In addition to his contributions to a wide array of published works, such as Bruce Perry's \"Malcolm X: The Last Speeches\", Abdur-Razzaq was featured in several television interviews and films, including \"\" and Gil Noble's \"Like It Is\". The DVD version of Jack Baxter's documentary \"Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X\" includes an \"Exclusive Interview with Abdullah Abdur-Razzaq, Malcolm X's closest associate\"."}
{"text":"In April 2013, Abdur-Razzaq returned to Lincoln University to speak about his memories and experiences working with Malcolm X."}
{"text":"Battling leukemia, Abdur-Razzaq was admitted to Harlem Hospital in late 2014. After several weeks, he was transferred to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he died on November 21, 2014, at the age of 82."}
{"text":"He is survived by children, grandchildren, and a large extended family."}
{"text":"Barbara T. Christian (December 12, 1943 in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands \u2013 June 25, 2000 in Berkeley, California) was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published articles, Christian was most well known for the 1980 study \"Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition\"."}
{"text":"In April 2000, Christian was awarded the UC Berkeley's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation. She died on June 25, 2000 from complications from lung cancer."}
{"text":"Cathy J. Cohen (born 1962) is an American political scientist, author, feminist, and social activist, whose work has focused on the African-American experience in politics from a perspective which is underlined by intersectionality. She is currently the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago, and is the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race (2002\u201305)."}
{"text":"She received her BA from Miami University, Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1993 and began her academic career at Yale University where she received tenure. Cohen joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2002."}
{"text":"Her book \"Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics\" explores how issues such as age, gender, sexuality and the growing AIDs epidemic shape the acceptance boundaries within the African-American community."}
{"text":"In \"Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and The Future of American Politics,\" Cohen uses findings from the Black Youth Project to provide a detailed description of what black youth want, how they understand intersecting challenges of opportunity and discrimination, and how we can begin to help transform the lived experiences and future outcomes of African American youth\".\""}
{"text":"Cohen is one of the founding board members of the Audre Lorde Project, which focuses on providing adequate representation, community wellness, and efficient economic and social justice for the LGBT+ communities they serve. Cohen is active in a number of organizations working on social justice issues; she has moderated the Applied Research Center's 2010 conference \"Popularizing Racial Justice\", and served as secretary of the American Political Science Association. Cohen has also been member of the Black Radical Congress, African American Women in Defense of Ourselves and the United Coalition Against Racism. She currently serves as a board member of the Arcus Foundation and of the University of Chicago\u2019s four charter schools."}
{"text":"\u201cPunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\u201d (1997)."}
{"text":"In \u201cPunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics\u201d, Cohen brings attention to and problematizes queer theory\u2019s single-oppression framework. She argues that this single-oppression framework reinforces the binary between queer\/non-queer, creating a category to identify with instead of strategically challenging heteronormativity. By heteronormativity, Cohen is referring to the practices and institutions that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships presumed to be \u201cnatural\u201d in society. Heteronormativity is the normalizing power that is at the focus of queer politics."}
{"text":"Because \u201cqueer\u201d is taken up in public discourse as a \u201cdeviant sexuality\u201d and is indicative of non-normativity, Cohen argues that queer theory fails to advocate and recognize those who are not queer-identified as sexually marginalized subjects, which in turn, limits the radical potential of queer politics. She suggests that we broaden our understanding of queerness, because as it currently stands, the term \u201cqueer\u201d does not encompass all marginalized identities. She urges that we must recognize the intersections of oppression and understand how multiple identities work to limit the privilege granted to those who conform to heteronormativity. This article is a call for action for queer activism to take an intersectional approach towards transformation."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later\u201d (2019)."}
{"text":"In \u201cThe Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later\u201d, Cohen reflected on her article \u201cPunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens\u201d saying that it was shaped primarily by three factors: the HIV\/AIDS crisis, neoliberal policies and ideologies implemented by Reagan and Clinton that harmed the poor, and hope, which stands in contrast to the first two (she is referring to the emergence of Black feminist and Black gay and lesbians communities between the 70s-90s). The article is primarily focused on hope, as Cohen is afraid of the erasure that happens with re-writing history, especially around Black and gay communities framed as only as response to HIV\/AIDS. In fact, she argues that we need to remember that these communities were a radical attack on politics of respectability, and state violence."}
{"text":"She has received a number of awards, including the Robert Wood Johnson Investigator\u2019s Award, and the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Fellowship."}
{"text":"Cohen is the recipient of two research grants from the Ford Foundation for her work as principal investigator of the Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Cohen serves on a number of national and local advisory boards and is the co-editor with Frederick Harris of a book series at Oxford University Press entitled \"Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities\"."}
{"text":"In 2004, Cohen was awarded the Race, Politics, and Adolescent Health: Understanding the Health Attitudes and Behaviors of African American Youth Award. In 2004, Cohen was also interviewed for the Global Feminisms Project Comparative Case Studies Of Women's Activism and Scholarships, which is an archive of oral histories given by transnational women scholars and activists."}
{"text":"In 2013, Cohen gave the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture, entitled \"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Obama: Building a New Movement for the 21st Century\", at Gustavus Adolphus College."}
{"text":"Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born Rebecca Davis, (February 8, 1831March 9, 1895), was an American physician, nurse and author. After studying at the New England Female Medical College, in 1864 she became the first African-American woman to become a doctor of medicine in the United States. Crumpler was one of the first female physician authors in the nineteenth century. In 1883, she published \"A Book of Medical Discourses\". The book has two parts that cover the prevention and cure of infantile bowel complaints, and the life and growth of human beings. Dedicated to nurses and mothers, it focuses on maternal and pediatric medical care and was among the first publications written by an African American about medicine."}
{"text":"Crumpler graduated from medical college at a time when very few African Americans were allowed to attend medical college or publish books. Crumpler first practiced medicine in Boston, primarily serving poor women and children. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, believing treating women and children was an ideal way to perform missionary work. Crumpler worked for the Freedmen's Bureau to provide medical care for freed slaves."}
{"text":"She was subject to \"intense racism\" and sexism while practicing medicine. During this time, many men believed that a man's brain was 10 percent bigger than a woman's brain on average, and that a woman's job was to act submissively and be beautiful. Because of this, many male physicians did not respect Rebecca Lee Crumpler, and would not approve her prescriptions for patients or listen to her medical opinions. Still, Rebecca Lee Crumpler persevered and worked passionately."}
{"text":"She later moved back to Boston to continue to treat women and children. The Rebecca Lee Pre-Health Society at Syracuse University and the Rebecca Lee Society, one of the first medical societies for African-American women, were named after her. Her Joy Street house is a stop on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail."}
{"text":"In 1831, Crumpler, was born in Christiana, Delaware to Matilda Webber and Absolum Davis. She was raised in Pennsylvania by her aunt who cared for ill townspeople. Her aunt acted as the doctor in her community and had a huge influence on her. She was inspired by her aunt after seeing that she was the one to go to when people got sick. She moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1852, where she worked as a nurse before applying and becoming accepted into the New England Female Medical College. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the only African American woman who attended this school at this time."}
{"text":"From 1855 to 1864, Crumpler was employed as a nurse. She was accepted into the New England Female Medical College in 1860. This school was founded in 1848 by Samuel Gregory. She won a tuition award from the Wade Scholarship Fund, established by a bequest from local businessman John Wade of Woburn."}
{"text":"It was rare for women or black men to be admitted to medical schools during this time. In 1860, due to the heavy demands of medical care for Civil War veterans, there were more opportunities for women physicians and doctors. Due to her talent, Crumpler was given a recommendation to attend the school by her supervising physician when she was a medical apprentice. That year, there were 54,543 physicians in the United States, 300 of whom were women. None of them were African Americans making Rebecca Lee Crumpler the first and only African American physician in her class."}
{"text":"Crumpler graduated from New England Female Medical College in 1864 after having completed three years of coursework, a thesis, and final oral examinations in February 1864. On March 1, 1864, the board of trustees named her a Doctor of Medicine. Married to Wyatt Lee at that time, she was identified as Mrs. Rebecca Lee by the school, where she was the only African American graduate. She was the country's first African-American woman to become a formally-trained physician."}
{"text":"Crumpler first practiced medicine in Boston. She primarily cared for poor African-American women and children. After the end of the American Civil War (1861\u20131865), she moved to Richmond, Virginia, believing it to be an ideal way to provide missionary service, as well as to gain more experience learning about diseases that affected women and children. She said of that time, \"During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled... to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored.\""}
{"text":"Crumpler worked for the Freedmen's Bureau to provide medical care to freed slaves who were denied care by white physicians. At the Freedmen's Bureau she worked under the assistant commissioner, Orlando Brown. Subject to intense racism by both the administration and other physicians, she had difficulty getting prescriptions filled and was ignored by male physicians. Some people heckled that the M.D. behind her name stood for \"Mule Driver\".Rebecca knew being the first African American woman in this field would be challenging, but she was resilient and overcame this adversity."}
{"text":"Crumpler moved to 67 Joy Street in Boston, a predominantly African-American community street in Beacon Hill. She practiced medicine and treated children without much concern for the parents' ability to pay. Her house is on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail."}
{"text":"In 1860, bearing letters of recommendation from her physician-employers, Crumpler was accepted into the elite West Newton English and Classical School in Massachusetts, where she was a \"special student in mathematics\". Crumpler taught in Wilmington beginning in 1874 and in New Castle, Delaware beginning in 1876."}
{"text":"While living in Charlestown, Rebecca Davis married Wyatt Lee, a Virginia native and former slave. They were married on April 19, 1852. This was Wyatt\u2019s second, and her first, marriage. A year later Wyatt\u2019s son, Albert, died at age 7. This tragedy may have motivated Rebecca to begin her study of nursing for the next eight years. Rebecca was still a medical student when her husband died of tuberculosis on April 18, 1863. He is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston."}
{"text":"The couple were active members of the Twelfth Baptist Church where Arthur was a trustee. They had a home at 20 Garden Street in Boston. Their daughter Lizzie Sinclair Crumpler was born in mid-December 1870."}
{"text":"Crumpler spoke at a service for Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner upon his death in 1874. She read a poem that she had written for him, where \"she touchingly alluded to his love for the gifted Emerson\". By 1880, the Crumplers moved to Hyde Park, Boston."}
{"text":"Although no photographs or other images of Crumpler survive, a \"Boston Globe\" article described her as \"a very pleasant and intellectual woman and an indefatigable church worker. Dr. Crumpler is 59 or 60 years of age, tall and straight, with light brown skin and gray hair.\" About marriage, she said the secret to a successful marriage \"is to continue in the careful routine of the courting days, till it becomes well understood between the two\"."}
{"text":"Rebecca Crumpler died on March 9, 1895, in Fairview, Massachusetts, while still residing in Hyde Park. She and her husband Arthur are both buried at the nearby Fairview Cemetery. Arthur died in May 1910. She and her husband were buried in unmarked graves for 125 years, until July 16, 2020. Donations were collected through a fundraiser to create gravestones for the couple and a ceremony was held at Fairview Cemetery, as a gravestone finally was installed, marking where she and her husband are buried."}
{"text":"The Rebecca Lee Society, one of the first medical societies for African-American women, was named in her honor. Her home on Joy Street is a stop on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail."}
{"text":"In 2019, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam declared March 30 (National Doctors Day) the Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler Day."}
{"text":"At Syracuse University there is a pre-health club named \"The Rebecca Lee Pre-Health Society\". This club encourages people of diverse backgrounds to pursue health professions. They offer mentors, workshops, and resources to help members succeed. Rebecca Lee Crumpler and her husband Arthur Crumpler also received new granite headstones to celebrate her achievement of being a pioneer physician who earned her medical degree in Boston."}
{"text":"Demico Boothe is an African-American bestselling author of several books on the plight of African American men in the American prison system. Boothe's book, \"Why Are There So Many Black Men in Jail?\" addresses the issue of racism in the Crack versus Cocaine Laws and was published in 2007, three years before Michelle Alexander's better-known book that also addresses the subject, \"The New Jim Crow,\" published in 2010. \"Why Are There So Many Black Men in Prison?\" is on the Black Lives Matter recommended reading list."}
{"text":"Boothe was born in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up partly in his mother\u2019s home in the Castalia Heights Projects in South Memphis, and partly at his father\u2019s home, in a part of Memphis that was originally \u201cresidential, crime-free\u201d but that degenerated during Boothe\u2019s teen years when Crip gang members started inducting young neighborhood men into the drug trade."}
{"text":"In addition, Boothe\u2019s father, who had previously made a good living in business, developed a crack cocaine habit and began spending all his money on the drug. Boothe started working two part-time jobs, but his father demanded the earnings so he could buy drugs."}
{"text":"Boothe had always hoped to go to college. By the time he was finishing up high school and determining how he could finance a college degree, his father had entered a drug rehabilitation program but was still in too much debt due to his previous drug habit to help Boothe out financially. In addition, Boothe\u2019s younger brother was making large amounts of money selling cocaine. Boothe then made the decision to engage in cocaine sales in order to make enough money to pay for his college fees."}
{"text":"After six months of selling, at the age of 18, Boothe was arrested (on a first-time charge) and sentenced to ten years in prison for \u201cpossession with intent to distribute over 50 grams of crack cocaine.\u201d At that time, crack cocaine sentences were 100 times longer than for selling powder cocaine. A major theme of his book, \"Why Are There So Many Black Men in Prison?\" is this sentencing disparity, which Boothe blames on racism."}
{"text":"After serving eight years and ten months in various prisons, Boothe was released. He was determined to stay out of prison but, six months after his release, was re-arrested when he unknowingly drove a friend to a rendezvous to buy counterfeit money. The friend promised to testify that Boothe had known nothing about the counterfeit money, but upon being repeatedly warned and pressured by both his counsel and the judge, the friend decided not to testify after all. The friend\u2019s mother did testify to Boothe\u2019s innocence, but the jury still convicted Boothe to another 46 months in prison."}
{"text":"During this second prison stint, Boothe set out to educate himself as part of an overall plan to prepare himself for life outside and to do all he could to make sure he never did time again."}
{"text":"Altogether, Boothe spent nearly 13 years in federal prison and was released in 2003. He wrote his first book, entitled \"Why Are So Many Black Men in Prison?\", while incarcerated. To date, he has written and published three other books, including: \"Getting Out & Staying Out: A Black Man's Guide to Success After Prison\" and \"The Top 25 Things Black Folks Do That We Need To Stop!!!\" The latter was published in January, 2009, and received much critical acclaim within the African-American community."}
{"text":"Boothe is a noted expert on many subjects and issues concerning the African-American community, with an emphasis on the U.S. criminal justice system as it relates to black males."}
{"text":"Besides addressing the issue of anti-black racism in the legal and prison system, Boothe is an advocate for education and lifelong learning. He notes, for example, that the black men he met in prison were very badly educated."}
{"text":"On the back of his book, Why Are \"So Many Black Men in Prison?\", Boothe states that, while he was incarcerated, he read and studied over 500 books, including the entire Webster's Dictionary, the Bible, the Qur'an, as well as every alphabetical entry in the 1998 Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica."}
{"text":"Boothe also advocates taking a pragmatic approach to avoiding the \"school to prison pipeline.\" In his book, \"Getting Out and Staying Out: A Black Man's Guide to Success After Prison,\" he suggests \"taking full control and responsibility of yourself and your actions from that point on, despite any injustices or wrongful actions that may have been committed against you by the system.\" Other suggestions are, as above, embarking on a serious reading program while still in prison, and when out, developing an entrepreneurial work style, and growing, fostering, and maintaining a committed, supportive relationship and permanent family unit."}
{"text":"\"Why Are There So Many Black People in Prison?\" (2007)"}
{"text":"\"The Top 25 Things Black Folks Do that We Need to Stop!!!\" (2009)"}
{"text":"\"Getting Out & Staying Out: A Black Man's Guide to Success after Prison\" (2012)"}
{"text":"\"The U.S. Child Support System and the Black Family\" (2018)"}
{"text":"David Ehrenstein (born February 18, 1947) is an American critic who focuses primarily on LGBTQ issues in cinema."}
{"text":"Ehrenstein was born in New York City. His father was a secular Jew with Polish ancestors, and his mother was half African-American, half Irish. His mother raised him in her religion, Roman Catholicism. He attended the High School of Music and Art (different from the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) and then Pace College (now Pace University). He now lives in Los Angeles. He is openly gay."}
{"text":"His writing career started in 1965 with an interview with Andy Warhol which was published in \"Film Culture\" magazine in 1966. Ehrenstein wrote for \"Film Culture\" until 1983. During the 1960s he also wrote for \"December\" and the \"Village Voice\". In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles with his partner Bill Reed and began work as a film critic and entertainment journalist for the \"Los Angeles Herald-Examiner\" and also wrote for \"Film Comment\" and \"Film Quarterly\" during this period."}
{"text":"In 1982 he collaborated with Bill Reed on the book \"Rock On Film\", while continuing to write for diverse publications, including the \"San Francisco Examiner\", \"Rolling Stone\", \"Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma\", \"Arts\", the \"Los Angeles Reader\", \"Enclitic\", and \"Wide Angle\". From the \"Herald-Examiner\" he moved to \"Daily Variety\" and later \"The Advocate\". He also wrote \"Film: The Front Line - 1984\", a survey of experimental and independent film work. He has contributed to \"Sight and Sound\"."}
{"text":"In 1987 he served as the film researcher and historian for the \"Hollywood and History\" costume exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1992 he published \"The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese\". In 1998 he published \"Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1927-1997\". As he documents on his blog and website, lawyers representing Hollywood actor Tom Cruise threatened to take legal action against Ehrenstein because he wrote of how Cruise is appealing to both men and women."}
{"text":"Ehrenstein has appeared often on \"The E! True Hollywood Story\", specifically for the profiles of Rock Hudson, Sonny Bono, and Bob Guccione. He has also written about the film \"Brokeback Mountain\" for \"LA Weekly\". His homepage and blog also contain commentary and satire on various journalists, politicians and figures in the entertainment industry."}
{"text":"Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1849\u00a0\u2013 September 16, 1949) was an American educator, writer and activist."}
{"text":"Originally of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she moved with her parents while quite young to a farm near Chatham, Canada. Brown was born to parents who had been enslaved. Brown's family moved to Canada in 1864 and then to Ohio in 1870. In 1868, she began a course of study in Wilberforce University, Ohio, from which she graduated in 1873 with the degree of Bachelor of Science."}
{"text":"Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six children."}
{"text":"Her parents, Frances Jane Scroggins and Thomas Arthur Brown, were freed slaves."}
{"text":"Her brother, Jeremiah, became a politician in Ohio."}
{"text":"At a young age, Brown's parents and siblings migrated to Ontario, Canada. She attended Wilberforce University and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1873. There were a total of six people in her class. One of her classmates was the wife of Rev. B. F. Lee, D.D., ex-President of Wilberforce."}
{"text":"Her fame as instructor spread and her services were secured as teacher at Yazoo City. On account of the unsettled state of affairs in 1874\u20135, she was compelled to return North. Thus the South lost one of its most valuable missionaries. Brown then taught in Dayton, Ohio, for four years. Owing to ill health, she gave up teaching. She was persuaded to travel for her alma mater, Wilberforce, and started on a lecturing tour, concluding at Hampton School, Virginia. After taking a course in elocution at this place, she traveled again, having much greater success, and received favorable criticism from the press."}
{"text":"She was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1885 to 1887 and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama during 1892\u201393 under Booker T. Washington. She became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893, and was a frequent lecturer on African American issues and the temperance movement, speaking at the international Woman's Christian Temperance Union conference in London in 1895 and representing the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899. She also performed in front of Queen Victoria in 1897."}
{"text":"In 1896, she held a meeting in Edinburgh and gave an interview with a correspondent of \"The Edinburgh Evening News.\" The correspondent wrote:"}
{"text":"For several years she traveled with \"The Wilberforce Grand Concert Company\", an organization for the benefit of Wilberforce College. She read before hundreds of audiences, and tens of thousands of people. She possessed a magnetic voice, seeming to have perfect control of the muscles of the throat, and could vary her voice as successfully. As a public reader, Brown enthused her audiences. In her humorous selections, she often caused \"wave after wave\" of laughter; in her pathetic pieces, she often moved her audience to tears."}
{"text":"In 1893, Brown presented a paper at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. In addition to Brown, four more African American women presented at the conference: Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Sarah Jane Woodson Early."}
{"text":"Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1894 merged into the National Association of Colored Women. She was president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1905 until 1912, and of the National Association of Colored Women from 1920 until 1924. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1924 and later directed campaign work among African-American women for President Calvin Coolidge. Brown was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta."}
{"text":"She was a prominent member of the A. M. E. Church; also a member of the \"King's Daughters,\" \"Human Rights League,\" and the \"Isabella Association.\" Brown died on September 16, 1949, in Wilberforce, Ohio, and is buried at Massies Creek Cemetery in Cedarville, Ohio. Her biography, \"Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist, 1845(?)-1949\", was published by Annjennette Sophie in 1975."}
{"text":"Ashley Nicole Black (born June 15, 1985) is an American comedian, actress, and writer from Los Angeles, California. She was a writer and correspondent for \"Full Frontal with Samantha Bee\" from 2016-2019. She left the show in February 2019 to write and act in \"A Black Lady Sketch Show\" on HBO."}
{"text":"Black received the 2017 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for her work on \"Full Frontal.\""}
{"text":"Black was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in Walnut, California, a suburb of said city."}
{"text":"Black graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007 with a degree in theatre arts. She then attended Northwestern University, where she earned a master's degree in performance studies. Black was four years into a PhD program at Northwestern University when she decided to drop out and pursue her dream of working in comedy."}
{"text":"Black's comedy career began at the Second City, where she first attended an improv class that her parents paid for her to attend."}
{"text":"In 2016, she was hired as a correspondent on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. She worked on the show for three years, during which time she received six total Primetime Emmy Award nominations, winning in 2017 for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special. Her last episode on \"Full Frontal\" was on February 13, 2019."}
{"text":"Black has also appeared as an actor on Comedy Central's \"Drunk History\" and in the 2014 film \"An American Education\"."}
{"text":"In 2019, Black joined other WGA writers in firing their agents as part of the WGA's stand against the ATA and the unfair practice of packaging."}
{"text":"She is a cast member and writer on HBO's \"A Black Lady Sketch Show\", which debuted in 2019."}
{"text":"Mary Elizabeth Carnegie (19 April 1916 \u2013 20 February 2008) was an educator and author in the field of nursing. Known for breaking down racial barriers, she was the first black nurse to serve as a voting member on the board of a state nursing association. She was later president of the American Academy of Nursing and edited the journal \"Nursing Research\"."}
{"text":"She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, received a diploma from the Lincoln School of Nurses, bachelor's degree from West Virginia State College, master's degree from Syracuse University, and doctor of public administration degree from New York University."}
{"text":"After receiving her bachelor's degree from West Virginia State College, Carnegie took a job in a hospital in Richmond, Virginia. She became a clinical instructor at St. Philip Hospital School of Nursing. While working at St. Philip, Carnegie was exposed to a different social system in the nursing world in the south."}
{"text":"Carnegie joined the Florida Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (FACGN) in 1945. She was elected president of the organization three years later. Traditionally, the FACGN was named a courtesy (non-voting) board member of the Florida State Nurses Association the next year. After Carnegie's service with the FACGN, the FSNA board decided to grant her full rights and responsibilities on their board. She was the first black nurse to serve on the board of a state nursing association."}
{"text":"Between 1945 and 1953, Carnegie was a professor and dean of the nursing school at Florida A&M University. She later served as president of the American Academy of Nursing and was the editor of \"Nursing Research\". She was awarded eight honorary doctorates and was inducted into the hall of fame of the American Nurses Association. She was inducted into the Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame in 2009."}
{"text":"After developing hypertensive cardiovascular disease, Carnegie died in 2008 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She had lived there for 25 years. Carnegie had been married once; her husband died in 1954."}
{"text":"Williams held some good memories of his early years, saying that of the family that enslaved him and his relatives, they were \"of all slave holders, the very best.\" The younger children had almost all of their time free to play. Early on, Williams would play with the neighbor's white children, and later with other black children on the plantation that to which he moved."}
{"text":"However, Sam makes sure to clearly indicate, \"There is nothing good to be said of American slavery. I know it is sometimes customary to speak of its bright and its dark sides. I am not prepared to admit that it had any bright sides, unless it was the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln...\""}
{"text":"In his early childhood, while the four white children Williams played with were at school, Williams was taught how to read and write by the three unmarried white ladies who were most likely part of the family that enslaved Williams' father. He was taught using only one book, which he called \"Thomas Dilworth's,\" referring to \"A New Guide to the English Tongue\" by Thomas Dilworth. From the book, Williams claims he learned about grammar, weights and measures, ciphers, and morals. In addition, Williams describes the popular use of slates for his lessons, as well as his fascination with fable illustrations that instructed what was moral and what was not:"}
{"text":"\"...such as that of the man who prayed to Hercules to take his wagon out of the mire; of the two men who stole a piece of meat; of the lazy maids and of the kindhearted man who took a half frozen serpent into his house.\""}
{"text":"He also states many slaves were punished for being found in possession of the schoolbook, though the reward of mastering the book was being considered a \"prodigy of learning\" within the slave community."}
{"text":"\"Mr. Ward was what was called a 'good master.' His people were well-fed, well-housed, and not over-worked. There were certain inflexible rules however, governing his plantation of which he allowed not the slightest infraction, for he had his place for the Negro... His place for the Negro was in subjection and servitude to the white man.\""}
{"text":"Williams alludes to his master's classism, pointing out that his white supremacy ideology did not extend to all whites and that there were some he would have barred from slaveholding. Ward, like many other slaveholders, asserted his role as owner and enslaver with a paternalistic view. He provided well for his slaves while demanding complete obedience. Ward, for example, took care to always know their whereabouts by insisting he authorize any departure from his land and as Williams depicts in his memoir, Ward had no qualms about punishing those slaves he felt defied him."}
{"text":"As a boy, Williams learned to ride horses from one of his enslavers. Williams states, \"He taught me to ride, and when I could sit my horse well 'bare-back' he had a saddle made for me at the then famous 'McKinzie's' saddlery, sign of the 'White Horse' at the corner of Church and Chalmers Street.\" This training to ride was not wholly unique to Williams' experience. In fact, enslaved people were essential to the world of horse racing in the American South. Jockeys and trainers were commonly enslaved people. Despite limited privileges, these enslaved horse riders were still subjected to the realities of being slaves in a slave society. Williams never became a formal jockey, however, and of this he says the following:"}
{"text":"\"Possibly Mr. Dane had 'views', concerning me for he owned several fast horses, but before I was old enough to be of practical service, 'Sherman came marching through Georgia.'\""}
{"text":"\"And here I must admit I wore the 'gray.' I have never attended any of the Confederate reunions. I suppose they overlooked my name on the army roll!\""}
{"text":"Williams' childhood home on Guignard Street was destroyed by the Great Charleston Fire on December 11, 1861. This fire destroyed many of the main landmarks such as the Charleston Circular Church and Institute Hall where the Ordinance of Secession was signed, and Williams remembered it to be the biggest blaze he would ever see in Charleston. Remembering the event in his memoir, Williams describes how \"the sparks seemed to rain down as we ran.\" Thus, Williams' memoir serves as an eye-witness account of the chaos and fear created by the Great Fire."}
{"text":"Once the Confederates surrendered, life in South Carolina changed dramatically for Williams and his family. They were reunited under one roof; Alexander Williams and his family resided on Princess Street in Charleston for many years."}
{"text":"Williams' account of this era includes reflections about the \"Black Code\" or laws passed to restrict civil and social rights of freedmen. He wondered why, at least in his time when writing his memoir in the 20th century, one did not hear much about this, saying that perhaps \"somebody is ashamed of it.\""}
{"text":"In 1876, Williams' employer asked him to vote for General Wade Hampton. Williams chose not to vote in the election at all, even though he heard the General speak:"}
{"text":"\"Our only desire he said, was to save our dear old state from utter ruin. Then, raising his right hand to heaven he said these very words as near as I can recollect, \"If I am elected governor, I swear to God that not one right or privilege that you now enjoy shall be taken from you!\""}
{"text":"Williams also noted that many of the promises that General Hampton made did not come to fruition and that, in fact, acts of disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws were being enacted against blacks during this era."}
{"text":"Sometime in the 1880s, Williams moved to Vermont (he appears to have moved initially to Springfield VT) and soon sent for his second wife and children (several from his first marriage and perhaps some step children or children from his second wife)to join him. While not much is known about his life in Vermont, he and his eldest daughter Susan show up in the 1910 census, living in Lebanon, NH where they worked as servants for the Carter family. In Vermont, both worked for author Thomas H. Thomas. They were listed in the 1920 United States Federal Census, living in Windsor with the Thomas Family."}
{"text":"Williams appears to have moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1920s with his daughter Susan, who married an African-American lawyer\/dentist named William Alexander Cox. Cox was also heavily involved in the National Negro Business League."}
{"text":"After an illness weakened Williams' eyes and he feared going blind, he decided to record events from his past. He was also motivated in writing his memoir by the desire to remind future generations of African Americans of the cruel experience of slavery, a reason disclosed in the memoir's preface:"}
{"text":"\"It is a remarkable fact that very many of the immediate descendants of those who passed through the trying ordeal of American slavery know nothing of the hardships through which their fathers came. Some reason for this may be found in the fact that those fathers hated to harrow the minds of their children by the recital of their cruel experiences of those dark days... While it is sweet to forgive and forget, there are somethings that should never be forgotten. If this humble narrative will serve to cause the youth of my people to take a glance backward, the object of the writer will have been attained.\""}
{"text":"Williams continued to live with his family for several decades after publishing his memoir and died in Massachusetts in 1946."}
{"text":"Anita Cornwell (born September 23, 1923) is an American lesbian feminist author. In 1983 she wrote the first collection of essays by an African-American lesbian, \"Black Lesbian in White America\"."}
{"text":"Born in Greenwood, South Carolina, Cornwell moved to Pennsylvania at the age of 16, living first in Yeadon with her aunt, then in Philadelphia with her mother, who moved north when Cornwell was aged 18. Cornwell has one sibling, an older brother. She graduated from Temple University with a B.S. in journalism and the social sciences in 1948. She worked as a journalist for local newspapers and a clerical worker for government agencies."}
{"text":"Cornwell's early writings, published in \"The Ladder\" and \"The Negro Digest\" in the 1950s, were among the first to identify the author as a black lesbian, and other publications where her work has appeared include \"Feminist Review\", \"Labyrinth\", \"National Leader\", and the \"Los Angeles Free Press\"."}
{"text":"Published on October 1, 1983, Cornwell's first book \"Black Lesbian in White America\", which includes her essays and an interview with activist Audre Lorde, is widely noted as the first collection of essays by a black lesbian."}
{"text":"Cornwell was honored by the Annual Lambda Literary Festival, which was held in Philadelphia in 2000."}
{"text":"Robert Lee Allen (born May 29, 1942) is an American activist, writer, and Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously taught at San Jos\u00e9 State University and Mills College. He was Senior Editor (with Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Robert Chrisman) of \"The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research\", published quarterly or more frequently in Oakland, California, by the Black World Foundation since 1969."}
{"text":"In the 1980s he co-founded with Alice Walker the publishing company called Wild Trees Press, publishing the work of Third World writers."}
{"text":"Martha Gruening (1889\u20131937) was an American-Jewish journalist, poet, suffragette, and civil rights activist, born in Philadelphia. Gruening was an early advocate for the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. Her writings and research for the NAACP led to the advancement of the civil rights movement and worked to include women of color in the fight for women's suffrage."}
{"text":"Martha Gruening was born in Philadelphia in 1889 as one of five siblings. Her father was a renowned physician, and encouraged open discussions about political and social inequality within the United States. As a Jewish woman, she faced her own form of discrimination, but was otherwise privileged enough to pursue higher education. She attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, which reflected the progressive ideals of her family. In 1909, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts college for women. Here, she founded the college league of the National American Woman\u2019s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), to promote women's suffrage - which she later broke from over \u201cits refusal to seat an African American delegate at its 1912 convention in Atlanta to placate increasingly powerful southern members\u201d."}
{"text":"Gruening's essay \"With Malice Afterthought\" was published in The Forum (American magazine) in January 1916. Here, she vehemently advocated against the death penalty by writing the story of a Frank Johnson. The essay recounts Johnson's attempts to kill himself, only to be stopped by the doctors at the prison. The doctors then nurse him back to health until he begins to want to live again. Then, they execute him. Although short, it is an emotional and seminal article that conveys the horrific side of the death penalty."}
{"text":"Gruening served as the assistant secretary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and wrote reports on national events for the association. Gruening's research on lynchings within the United States was fundamental to the NAACP. Aided by the NAACP Field Investigator Helen Boardman, Gruening helped organize verifiable data into the NAACP's first book, \"Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States 1889-1918.\" The two women gathered all of the data manually, documenting 2,224 lynchings: 702 whites (11 female), 2,522 \u201c\"colored\"\u201d (50 female). The information was accompanied by 100 individual accounts of lynchings, including the stories of 11 women (four pregnant) that confronted general perceptions of lynching. The book and Gruening's research was essential in raising awareness of the horror of lynchings in the United States."}
{"text":"Three years after having adopted an African-American child, David Butt, son of two African-American theatre performers from South Carolina, Gruening bought the Gomez Mill House, in 1918 to provide him a proper education. She set up Mill House as a \u201cLibertarian International School\u201d that provided education for children of all races. Martha encouraged progressive European models of education and partnered with Helen Boardman, an NAACP collaborator. Though it was listed as established in a 1921 almanac, there has been no further evidence that the school ever opened to the public. Later, Gruening allowed for the Gomez Mill House to be sold in 1923 by Helen Boardman."}
{"text":"Cecil Brown (born July 3, 1943) is an African-American writer and educator. He is a published novelist, short story writer, script writer, and college educator. His noted works include \"The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger\" (1969) and work on the 1977 Richard Pryor film \"Which Way Is Up?\" as a screenwriter."}
{"text":"Born in rural Bolton, North Carolina, Brown attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University of Greensboro, North Carolina, where he earned his B.A. in English in 1966. He later attended Columbia University, and earned his M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Brown while residing in Berkeley, California (to which he returned in the late 1980s and still lives and works), earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies, Folklore and Narrative in 1993. He is a professor at UC Berkeley."}
{"text":"James Forman (October 4, 1928 \u2013 January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As the executive secretary of SNCC from 1961 to 1966, Forman played a significant role in the freedom rides, the Albany movement, the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma to Montgomery marches."}
{"text":"After the 1960s, Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black people around issues of social and economic equality. He also taught at American University and other major institutions. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including \"Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement\" (1969), \"The Making of Black Revolutionaries\" (1972 and 1997) and \"Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People\" (1984)."}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" called him \"a civil rights pioneer who brought a fiercely revolutionary vision and masterly organizational skills to virtually every major civil rights battleground in the 1960s.\""}
{"text":"James' first experience with lynching came when a white man showed up on his doorstep, asking for food and asking that they not tell anyone where he was. The next day, news spread that a white man had been lynched although Forman never learned why. When Forman was around the age of six he had his first experience with racial segregation. While visiting an aunt in Tennessee, Forman attempted to buy a Coca-Cola from a local drugstore."}
{"text":"He was told that if he wanted to buy one that he would have to drink it in the back and not at the counter."}
{"text":"Confused, Forman asked why and was told \"Boy, you're a nigger.\" This was the first time in his life he realized that because of the color of his skin that there were \"things [he] could and could not do, and other people had the 'right' to tell [him] what [he] could and could not do.\""}
{"text":"From the age of seven onward, James earned a small amount from selling issues of the \"Chicago Defender\". He would often read these papers which helped develop a \"strong sense of protest.\" He read the works of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and was heavily influenced by Du Bois. He called Washington an \"apologist\" and often quoted Du Bois and his call for advancing blacks through education. He had yet to enter high school but for James the \"race issue was on my mind, before my eyes, and in my blood.\""}
{"text":"When Forman returned to high school he returned to general coursework and was an honors student. During school he was influenced by the writings of such figures as Richard Wright and Carl Sandburg. He received ROTC training and the \"Chicago Tribune\" Silver and Gold medal for efficiency as a non-commissioned officer; he was a lieutenant upon graduation. He was also the honor student of his graduating class which landed him an interview in the \"Chicago Tribune\". During the interview he said that when he grew up he wanted to become a \"humanitarian\" and a minister as opposed to a preacher. He graduated high school in January 1947."}
{"text":"In 1961, Forman joined the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced \"snick\"). From 1961 to 1966, Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs. Under the leadership of Forman and others, SNCC became an important political player at the height of the civil rights movement. SNCC began as an affiliate of another direct action group of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At times, Forman's more confrontational and radical style of activism clashed with King's Christian pacifist approach."}
{"text":"In August 1961, Forman was jailed with other freedom riders protesting segregated facilities in Monroe, North Carolina. This episode brought him into contact with Robert F. Williams who won Forman's admiration. During a visit to Williams' home in Monroe, Forman discussed the positive role of using armed self-defense in the struggle against white oppression. After his sentence was suspended, Forman agreed to become executive secretary of SNCC."}
{"text":"Forman's occasional criticism of Dr. King was not simply a political exercise, but reflected a genuine concern about the direction King was leading the movement in. He specifically questioned King's top-down leadership style, which he saw as undermining the development of local grassroots movements. For example, following W. G. Anderson's invitation to King to join the Albany Movement, Forman criticized the move because he felt \"much harm could be done by interjecting the Messiah complex.\" He recognized that King's presence \"would detract from, rather than intensify,\" the focus on local people's leadership in the movement. Forman echoed the concerns of those in SNCC and the broader civil rights movement who saw the potential dangers of relying too heavily upon one dynamic leader."}
{"text":"In an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book \"Who Speaks for the Negro?\", Forman laid out many of his ideologies concerning SNCC, commenting that it is \"the one movement in this country that has within its spheres of activity room for intellectuals.\""}
{"text":"Years before the famous Selma marches of 1965, Forman and other SNCC organizers visited the city to assist the voter registration work of Amelia Boynton and J. L. Chestnut. In addition to frontline organizing, Forman facilitated a visit by celebrities James Baldwin and Dick Gregory for Selma's first \"Freedom Day\" in October 1963\u2014a day of mass African-American voter registration in a Jim Crow area."}
{"text":"Forman did significant work for SNCC in the cultural community. For instance, Forman recruited the young folk star Bob Dylan to play benefits and rallies for SNCC ( One of these rallies in Mississippi makes an appearance in the classic documentary \"Don't Look Back\"). When Dylan received an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee he said the honor really belonged to \"James Forman and SNCC.\""}
{"text":"On March 15 and 16, SNCC led several hundred demonstrators, including Alabama students, Northern students, and local adults, in protests near the capitol complex. The Montgomery County sheriff's posse met them on horseback and drove them back, whipping them. Against the objections of James Bevel, some protesters threw bricks and bottles at police. At a mass meeting on the night of the 16th, Forman \"whipped the crowd into a frenzy\" demanding that the President act to protect demonstrators, and warned, \"If we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fucking legs off.\""}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" featured the Montgomery confrontations on the front page the next day. Although Dr. King was concerned by Forman's violent rhetoric, he joined him in leading a march of 2000 people in Montgomery to the Montgomery County courthouse."}
{"text":"According to historian Gary May, \"City officials, also worried by the violent turn of events\u2026 apologized for the assault on SNCC protesters and invited King and Forman to discuss how to handle future protests in the city.\" In the negotiations, Montgomery officials agreed to stop using the county posse against protesters, and to issue march permits to blacks for the first time."}
{"text":"After being replaced by Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson as executive secretary, Forman remained close to the leadership of SNCC helping to negotiate the ill-fated \"merger\" of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in 1967 and even briefly taking a leadership position within the Panthers. In 1969, after the failure of the merger and the decline of SNCC as an effective political organization, Forman began associating with other Black political radical groups. In Detroit he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference, where his Black Manifesto was adopted. He also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee."}
{"text":"As a part of his \"Black Manifesto\", on a Sunday morning in May 1969, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, termed the demands \"exorbitant and fanciful,\" he was in sympathy with the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts."}
{"text":"On May 30, 1969, Forman made plans to pursue a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue. Kahane and the JDL forewarned Forman and the public about their intended actions and Forman never showed up at the synagogue."}
{"text":"During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman completed graduate work at Cornell University in African and African-American Studies and in 1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies."}
{"text":"Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality. He also taught at American University in Washington, D.C. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including \"Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement\" (1969), \"The Making of Black Revolutionaries\" (1972 and 1997) and \"Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People\" (1984)."}
{"text":"Forman died on January 10, 2005, of colon cancer, aged 76, at the Washington House, a hospice in Washington, DC."}
{"text":"Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of The Freedom Singers."}
{"text":"During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia \"Dinky\" Romilly, the second and only surviving child of the British-born journalist, anti-fascist activist and aristocrat, the Hon. Jessica Mitford, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Sir Winston Churchill. Though obituaries and other posthumous articles about Forman have stated that he and Romilly were married, correspondence between Romilly's mother and aunts state that the couple were not legally husband and wife."}
{"text":"Forman and Romilly had two sons: Chaka Forman and James Forman Jr., who is a professor at Yale Law School."}
{"text":"In his autobiography \"The Making Of Black Revolutionaries\" Forman devoted an entire chapter to explaining his atheism. He believed that \"belief in God hurts my people.\" He also received the African American Humanist Award in 1994."}
{"text":"Jayson Thomas Blair (born March 23, 1976) is a former American journalist who worked for \"The New York Times\". He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in his stories."}
{"text":"Blair published a memoir of this period, entitled \"Burning Down My Masters' House\" (2004), recounting his career, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder after his resignation, and his view of race relations at the newspaper. He later established a support group for people with bipolar disorder and became a life coach."}
{"text":"Blair was born in Columbia, Maryland, the son of a federal executive and a schoolteacher. While attending the University of Maryland, College Park, he was a student journalist. For the 1996\u20131997 academic year, he was selected as the second African-American editor-in-chief of its student newspaper, \"The Diamondback\". According to a 2004 article by the \"Baltimore Sun\", some of his fellow students opposed his selection describing him as \"an elbows-out competitor\"."}
{"text":"After a summer interning at \"The New York Times\" in 1998, Blair was offered an extended internship there. He declined in order to complete more coursework for graduation. But he returned to the \"Times\" in June 1999, with a year of coursework left to complete. That November, he was classified as an \"intermediate reporter\". He was later promoted to a full reporter and then to editor."}
{"text":"On April 28, 2003, Blair received a call from \"Times\" national editor James Roberts asking him about similarities between a story he had written two days earlier and one published April 18 by \"San Antonio Express-News\" reporter Macarena Hernandez. The senior editor of the \"Express-News\" had contacted the \"Times\" about the similarities between Blair's article in the \"Times\" and Hernandez's article in his paper."}
{"text":"The resulting inquiry led to the discovery of fabrication and plagiarism in a number of articles written by Blair. Some fabrications include Blair's claims to have traveled to the city mentioned in the dateline, when in fact he did not."}
{"text":"After internal investigations, \"The New York Times\" reported on Blair's journalistic misdeeds in an \"unprecedented\" 7,239-word front-page story on May 11, 2003, headlined \"Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception.\" The story called the affair \"a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper.\""}
{"text":"After the scandal broke, some 30 former staffers of \"The Diamondback\", who had worked with Blair when he was editor-in-chief at the university newspaper, signed a 2003 letter alleging that Blair had made four serious errors as a reporter and editor while at the University of Maryland. They said these and his work habits brought his integrity into question. The letter-signers alleged that questions raised by some of these staffers at the time were ignored by Maryland Media, Inc. (MMI), the board that owned the paper."}
{"text":"The investigation, known as the Siegal committee, found heated debate among the staff over affirmative action hiring, as Blair is African American. Jonathan Landman, Blair's editor, told the Siegal committee he felt that Blair's being black played a large part in the younger man's initial promotion in 2001 to full-time staffer. \"I think race was the decisive factor in his promotion,\" he said. \"I thought then and I think now that it was the wrong decision.\""}
{"text":"Others disagreed. Five days later, \"New York Times\" op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, an African American, asserted in his column that race had nothing to do with the Blair case:"}
{"text":"\"Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting.\" Herbert said, \"[F]olks who delight in attacking anything black, or anything designed to help blacks, have pounced on the Blair story as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with \"The New York Times\"s effort to diversify its newsroom, and beyond that, with the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere. And while these agitators won't admit it, the nasty subtext to their attack is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks.\""}
{"text":"Executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned after losing newsroom support in the aftermath of the scandal."}
{"text":"After resigning from the \"Times,\" Blair struggled with severe depression and, according to his memoir, entered a hospital for treatment. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time. He has acknowledged that he had been self-medicating when he was dealing with substance abuse of alcohol and cocaine in earlier years."}
{"text":"Blair later returned to college to complete his postponed degree. At one time he said he considered going into politics."}
{"text":"The year after he left the \"Times\", Blair wrote a memoir, \"Burning Down My Masters' House\", published by New Millennium Books in 2004. Its initial print run was 250,000 copies; some 1,400 were sold in its first nine days. The Associated Press reported that the potential audience for his book may have gained enough information from the \"New York Times\" coverage of the reporting scandal. Although most reviews were critical, sales of the book increased after Blair was interviewed by Larry King and Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly."}
{"text":"In his book Blair revealed extended substance abuse, which he had ended before he resigned from the newspaper, and a struggle with bipolar disorder, which was diagnosed and first treated after he resigned. He also discussed journalistic practices at the \"Times\", and his view of race relations and disagreements among senior editors at the newspaper."}
{"text":"In 2006 Blair was running a support group for people with bipolar disorder, for which he has received continuing treatment."}
{"text":"In 2007 he became a life coach, working in Virginia, opening his own coaching center five years later. He was still working in this field in 2016."}
{"text":"Molefi Kete Asante (; born Arthur Lee Smith Jr.; August 14, 1942) is an American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies."}
{"text":"Asante is known for his writings on Afrocentricity, a school of thought that has influenced the fields of sociology, intercultural communication, critical theory, political science, the history of Africa, and social work. He is the author of more than 66 books and the founding editor of the \"Journal of Black Studies\". He is the father of author and filmmaker M. K. Asante."}
{"text":"Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, the fourth of sixteen children. His father, Arthur Lee Smith, worked in a peanut warehouse and then on the Georgia Southern Railroad; his mother worked as a domestic. During the summers Asante would return to Georgia to work in the tobacco and cotton fields in order to earn tuition for school. An aunt, Georgia Smith, influenced him to pursue his education; she gave him his first book, a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens."}
{"text":"Smith attended Nashville Christian Institute, a Church of Christ-founded boarding school for black students, in Nashville, Tennessee. There he earned his high school diploma in 1960. While still in high school, he became involved with the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Fisk University student march in Nashville."}
{"text":"After graduation, he initially enrolled in Southwestern Christian College of Terrell, Texas, another historically black institution with Church of Christ roots. There he met Nigerian Essien Essien, whose character and intelligence inspired Smith to learn more about Africa."}
{"text":"Smith received his B.A. from Oklahoma Christian College (now Oklahoma Christian University) in 1964. He did graduate work, earning his master's degree from Pepperdine University in 1965 with a thesis on Marshall Keeble, a black preacher in the Church of Christ. Smith earned his PhD from UCLA in 1968 in communication studies. He worked for a time at UCLA, becoming the director of the Center for Afro-American Studies. At the age of 30, he was appointed by the University at Buffalo as a full professor and head of the Department of Communication."}
{"text":"In 1976, Asante chose to make a legal name change because he considered \"Arthur Lee Smith\" a slave name."}
{"text":"At the University at Buffalo, Asante advanced the ideas of international and intercultural communication; he wrote and published with colleagues, \"Handbook of Intercultural Communication,\" the first book in the field. Asante was elected president of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research in 1976. His work in intercultural communication made him a leading trainer of doctoral students in the field. Asante has directed more than one hundred PhD dissertations."}
{"text":"Asante published his first study of the black movement, \"Rhetoric of Black Revolution,\" in 1969. Subsequently, he wrote \"Transracial Communication,\" to explain how race complicates human interaction in American society. Soon Asante changed his focus to African-American and African culture in communication, with attention to the nature of African-American oratorical style."}
{"text":"Asante wrote \"Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change\" (1980) to announce a break with the past, where African-Americans believed they were on the margins of Europe and did not have a sense of historical centrality. He wrote on the conflict between white cultural hegemony and the oppressed African culture, and on the lack of victorious consciousness among Africans, a theme found in his principal philosophical work, \"The Afrocentric Idea\" (1987). Additional works on Afrocentric theory included \"Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge\" (1990), and \"An Afrocentric Manifesto\" (2007)."}
{"text":"The \"Utne Reader\" identified Asante as one of the 100 leading thinkers in America, writing, \"Asante is a genial, determined, and energetic cultural liberationist whose many books, including \"Afrocentricity\" and \"The Afrocentric Idea,\" articulate a powerful African-oriented pathway of thought, action, and cultural self-confidence for black Americans.\""}
{"text":"In 1986 Asante proposed the first doctoral program in African-American studies to the administration at Temple University. This program was approved, and the first class entered the doctorate in 1988. More than 500 applicants had sought admission to the graduate program. Temple became known as the leader among the African-American Studies departments; it was 10 years before the next doctoral program was introduced in this field, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997. Alumni from the Temple program are found in every continent, many nations, and many direct African American Studies programs at major universities."}
{"text":"According to \"The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Historical Writing Since 1945,\" Asante has \"based his entire career on Afrocentricity, and continues to defend it in spite of strong criticisms\"."}
{"text":"In 1980 Asante published \"Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change\", which initiated a discourse around the issue of African agency and subject place in historical and cultural phenomena. He maintained that Africans had been moved off-center in terms on most questions of identity, culture, and history. Afrocentricity sought to place Africans at the center of their own narratives and to reclaim the teaching of African-American history from where it had been marginalized by Europeans."}
{"text":"Asante's book \"The Afrocentric Idea\" was a more intellectual book about Afrocentricity than the earlier popular book. After the second edition of \"The Afrocentric Idea\" was released in 1998, Asante appeared as a guest on a number of television programs, including \"The Today Show\", \"60 Minutes\", and the \"MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour\", to discuss his ideas."}
{"text":"According to Asante's \"Afrocentric Manifesto\", an Afrocentric project requires a minimum of five characteristics: (1) an interest in a psychological location, (2) a commitment to finding the African subject place, (3) the defense of African cultural elements, (4) a commitment to lexical refinement, and (5) a commitment to correct the dislocations in the history of Africa."}
{"text":"Farai Chideya (; born July 27, 1969 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) is an American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. She produced and hosted \"Pop and Politics with Farai Chideya\", a series of radio specials on politics for 15 years. She is the creator and host of the podcast \"Our Body Politic\", which launched in September 2020."}
{"text":"Additionally, since 2012 Chideya has held the position of distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, where she teaches courses in radio production and media economics."}
{"text":"Chideya was born on July 27, 1969, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother is from Baltimore, Maryland, and her father is from Zimbabwe."}
{"text":"Chideya holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Harvard College. She graduated from Harvard in 1990, Magna Cum Laude."}
{"text":"Chideya was a member of the improv comedy troupe The Immediate Gratification Players. In 2000, she was distinguished as the most honored alumna from Harvard. Her academic life includes being a professional in residence at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in addition to her current position as distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University."}
{"text":"Chideya is also the founder and president of one of the earliest pop culture blogs in the US, PopandPolitics.com. During the 15 years of its existence, PopandPolitics.com was a training ground for young arts and culture journalists. In addition to her radio, video and online journalism, Chideya appears as a political analyst on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC News, Fox News, BET and HBO. She began working as a senior writer for the website FiveThirtyEight in 2015 covering issues including the 2016 presidential election."}
{"text":"In May 2009, Atria Books published Chideya's first novel, \"Kiss the Sky\", which details the life of a black female rock musician making a career comeback in New York. The book takes place just months before 9\/11 and is rooted in the ethos of the Black Rock movement and the New York club scene. Chideya is also part of The Finish Party writing group, and is the author of three non-fiction books about race and politics: \"Don't Believe the Hype\", \"The Color of Our Future\" and \"Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters\"."}
{"text":"Prior to 2009, Chideya was the host of the National Public Radio radio program \"News & Notes\". Before that, she hosted \"Your Call\", a daily radio call-in show on San Francisco, California's KALW public radio. She got her start in journalism working for \"Newsweek\" magazine, MTV News, the Oxygen Network and the non-profit community news website, TheBeehive.org. She has subsequently written pieces for \"The New York Times\", \"The Los Angeles Times Syndicate\", \"The Chicago Tribune Syndicate\", \"The American Prospect\", \"The San Francisco Chronicle\", \"Time Magazine\", \"\", \"Vibe Magazine\", \"Spin Magazine\" and \"Glamour\"."}
{"text":"From 2014 to 2015, Chideya produced and hosted \"One with Farai\", a podcast for Public Radio International (PRI), in which she interviewed distinguished individuals with a range of stories and opinions, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Urvashi Vaid, and Alec Ross."}
{"text":"Chideya is the recipient of a Foreign Press Center fellowship that took her to Japan in 2002, a Knight Foundation fellowship based at Stanford University in 2001 and a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center fellowship in 1996."}
{"text":"Her speeches on civic engagement, electoral politics, digital media, hip-hop, race and politics have taken her around the world\u2014from India to South Africa to Alaska. Syracuse University, the University of Southern California, the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, M.I.T., the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Louisiana State University, De Anza Community College, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, Wellesley College, Chicago State University, Harvard University and Smith College are just some of the places where she has spoken."}
{"text":"Thea Bowman (December 29, 1937 \u2013 March 30, 1990) was a Roman Catholic religious sister, teacher, and scholar who made a major contribution to the ministry of the Catholic Church toward her fellow African Americans. She became an evangelist among her people, assisted in the production of an African American Catholic hymnal, and was a popular speaker on faith and spirituality in her final years. She also helped found the National Black Sisters Conference to provide support for African-American women in Catholic religious institutes. In 2018, she was designated a Servant of God."}
{"text":"She was born Bertha Elizabeth Bowman in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1937. Her grandfather had been born a slave but her father was a physician and her mother a teacher. She was raised in a Methodist home but, with her parents' permission, converted to the Roman Catholic faith at the age of nine. She joined the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration at La Crosse, Wisconsin at age 15, overcoming her parents' objections."}
{"text":"Bowman attended Viterbo University, run by her congregation, and earned a B.A. in English in 1965. She went on to attend The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she earned an M.A. in English in 1969 and a Ph.D. in English in 1972, writing her doctoral thesis on Thomas More."}
{"text":"Bowman taught at an elementary school in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and then at a high school in Canton, Mississippi. She later taught at her alma maters, Viterbo College in La Crosse and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., as well as at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana."}
{"text":"In his book \"Eleven Modern Mystics\", Victor M. Parachin, a meditation teacher, notes Bowman's impact upon Catholic liturgical music in providing an intellectual, spiritual, historical, and cultural foundation for developing and legitimizing a distinct worship form for Black Catholics. Bowman had explained: \"When we understand our history and culture, then we can develop the ritual, the music and the devotional expression that satisfy us in the Church.\""}
{"text":"Bowman became instrumental in the 1987 publication of a new Catholic hymnal, \"Lead Me, Guide Me: The African American Catholic Hymnal\", the first such work directed to the Black community. James P. Lyke, Auxiliary Bishop of Cleveland (also an African-American), coordinated the hymnal project, saying it was born of the needs and aspirations of Black Catholics. Bowman was actively involved in selecting hymns to be included. The hymnal includes her essay titled \"The Gift of African American Sacred Song.\" In it, she wrote, \"Black sacred song is soulful song\" and described it in five ways:"}
{"text":"Her 1988 albums, \"Songs of My People\" and\" 'Round the Glory Manger\", released on stereo audiocassette by the Daughters of St. Paul, were re-released in 2020 for the 30th anniversary of Bowman's death under the title, \"Songs of My People: The Complete Collection.\""}
{"text":"Arguably no person in recent memory did more to resist and transform the sad legacy of segregation and racism in the Catholic Church than Thea Bowman ... who inspired millions with her singing and message of God's love for all races and faiths. Sister Thea awakened a sense of fellowship in people both within and well beyond the Catholic world, first and foremost through her charismatic presence."}
{"text":"During an appearance on the show \"60 Minutes\" with Mike Wallace, she prodded him into saying \"Black is beautiful\" and she said:"}
{"text":"I think the difference between me and some people is that I'm content to do my little bit. Sometimes people think they have to do big things in order to make change. But if each one would light a candle we'd have a tremendous light."}
{"text":"In 1989, shortly before her death, in recognition of her contributions to the service of the Church, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Religion by Boston College in Massachusetts."}
{"text":"Just months before her death from cancer, Bowman spoke to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1989 from her wheelchair, and the bishops \"powerfully and visibly moved, applauded her. When she finished they stood linking arms and singing as Thea led them in the spiritual, 'We Shall Overcome'.\" Harry Belafonte met her in Mississippi in 1989 hoping to do a film on her life. Less than a week before her death, the University of Notre Dame announced that it would award Bowman the 1990 Laetare Medal. It was presented posthumously at the 1990 commencement exercises. She died on March 30, 1990, aged 52, in Canton, Mississippi, and was buried with her parents in Memphis, Tennessee. The 25th anniversary of her death brought forth, again, numerous tributes."}
{"text":"Boston College instituted the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center (African, Hispanic, Asian, Native American), which in 2015 inaugurated an annual Thea Bowman Legacy Day. At the inaugural event of the legacy day, the keynote speaker mentioned how Bowman had stressed the importance of education for Blacks, and how she had legitimized a distinct form of worship for Black Catholics."}
{"text":"Shortly before her death, the Sister Thea Bowman Black Catholic Educational Foundation was established to raise scholarship money on a national scale, an endeavor Bowman saw as key to raising up the Black people. She conceived of the foundation as early as 1984 and articulated its mission for the students: \"Walk with us. Don't walk behind us and don't walk in front of us; walk with us.\" By 2015 it had put more than 150 African American students through college."}
{"text":"A cause for canonization has been opened for Bowman. In mid-2018, she was officially designated a Servant of God, the first of the four steps toward possible sainthood. At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' 2018 Fall General Assembly, the Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance indicated unanimous support for the advancement of Sister Thea Bowman's canonization cause on the diocesan level."}
{"text":"William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 \u2013 August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909."}
{"text":"Earlier, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth, a concept under the umbrella of Racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership."}
{"text":"Racism was the main target of Du Bois's polemics, and he strongly protested against lynching, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in education and employment. His cause included people of color everywhere, particularly Africans and Asians in colonies. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism and helped organize several Pan-African Congresses to fight for the independence of African colonies from European powers. Du Bois made several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. After World War I, he surveyed the experiences of American black soldiers in France and documented widespread prejudice and racism in the United States military."}
{"text":"Du Bois was a prolific author. His collection of essays, \"The Souls of Black Folk\", is a seminal work in African-American literature; and his 1935 magnum opus, \"Black Reconstruction in America\", challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction Era. Borrowing a phrase from Frederick Douglass, he popularized the use of the term color line to represent the injustice of the separate but equal doctrine prevalent in American social and political life. He opens \"The Souls of Black Folk\" with the central thesis of much of his life's work: \"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.\""}
{"text":"His 1940 autobiography \"Dusk of Dawn\" is regarded in part as one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and he published two other life stories, all three containing essays on sociology, politics and history. In his role as editor of the NAACP's journal \"The Crisis\", he published many influential pieces. Du Bois believed that capitalism was a primary cause of racism, and he was generally sympathetic to socialist causes throughout his life. He was an ardent peace activist and advocated nuclear disarmament. The United States' Civil Rights Act, embodying many of the reforms for which Du Bois had campaigned his entire life, was enacted a year after his death."}
{"text":"William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to Alfred and Mary Silvina (n\u00e9e Burghardt) Du Bois. Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state. She was descended from Dutch, African and English ancestors. William Du Bois's maternal great-great-grandfather was Tom Burghardt, a slave (born in West Africa around 1730) who was held by the Dutch colonist Conraed Burghardt. Tom briefly served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, which may have been how he gained his freedom during the late 18th century. His son Jack Burghardt was the father of Othello Burghardt, who in turn was the father of Mary Silvina Burghardt."}
{"text":"William Du Bois claimed Elizabeth Freeman as his relative; he wrote that she had married his great-grandfather Jack Burghardt. But Freeman was 20 years older than Burghardt, and no record of such a marriage has been found. It may have been Freeman's daughter, Betsy Humphrey, who married Burghardt after her first husband, Jonah Humphrey, left the area \"around 1811\", and after Burghardt's first wife died ( 1810). If so, Freeman would have been William Du Bois's step-great-great-grandmother. Anecdotal evidence supports Humphrey's marrying Burghardt; a close relationship of some form is likely."}
{"text":"William Du Bois's paternal great-grandfather was James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, an ethnic French-American of Huguenot origin who fathered several children with slave women. One of James' mixed-race sons was Alexander, who was born on Long Cay in the Bahamas in 1803; in 1810 he immigrated to the United States with his father. Alexander Du Bois traveled and worked in Haiti, where he fathered a son, Alfred, with a mistress. Alexander returned to Connecticut, leaving Alfred in Haiti with his mother."}
{"text":"Sometime before 1860, Alfred Du Bois immigrated to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. He married Mary Silvina Burghardt on February 5, 1867, in Housatonic, a village in Great Barrington. Alfred left Mary in 1870, two years after their son William was born. Mary Du Bois moved with her son back to her parents' house in Great Barrington, and they lived there until he was five. She worked to support her family (receiving some assistance from her brother and neighbors), until she suffered a stroke in the early 1880s. She died in 1885."}
{"text":"Great Barrington had a majority European American community, who generally treated Du Bois well. He attended the local integrated public school and played with white schoolmates. As an adult, he wrote about racism that he felt as a fatherless child and being a minority in the town. But teachers recognized his ability and encouraged his intellectual pursuits, and his rewarding experience with academic studies led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans. He graduated from the town's Searles High School. When he decided to attend college, the congregation of his childhood church, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington, raised the money for his tuition."}
{"text":"Relying on money donated by neighbors, Du Bois attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1885 to 1888. Like other Fisk students who relied on summer and intermittent teaching to support their university studies, Du Bois taught school during the summer of 1886 after his sophomore year. His travel to and residency in the South was Du Bois's first experience with Southern racism, which at the time encompassed Jim Crow laws, bigotry, suppression of black voting, and lynchings; the lattermost reached a peak in the next decade."}
{"text":"After receiving a bachelor's degree from Fisk, he attended Harvard College (which did not accept course credits from Fisk) from 1888 to 1890, where he was strongly influenced by professor William James, prominent in American philosophy. Du Bois paid his way through three years at Harvard with money from summer jobs, an inheritance, scholarships, and loans from friends. In 1890, Harvard awarded Du Bois his second bachelor's degree, \"cum laude\", in history. In 1891, Du Bois received a scholarship to attend the sociology graduate school at Harvard."}
{"text":"In the summer of 1894, Du Bois received several job offers, including from the prestigious Tuskegee Institute; he accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio. At Wilberforce, Du Bois was strongly influenced by Alexander Crummell, who believed that ideas and morals are necessary tools to effect social change. While at Wilberforce, Du Bois married Nina Gomer, one of his students, on May 12, 1896."}
{"text":"After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois accepted a one-year research job from the University of Pennsylvania as an \"assistant in sociology\" in the summer of 1896. He performed sociological field research in Philadelphia's African-American neighborhoods, which formed the foundation for his landmark study, \"The Philadelphia Negro\", published in 1899 while he was teaching at Atlanta University. It was the first case study of a black community in the United States."}
{"text":"By the 1890s, Philadelphia's black neighborhoods had a negative reputation in terms of crime, poverty, and mortality. Du Bois's book undermined the stereotypes with empirical evidence and shaped his approach to segregation and its negative impact on black lives and reputations. The results led him to realize that racial integration was the key to democratic equality in American cities. The methodology employed in \"The Philadelphia Negro\", namely the description and the mapping of social characteristics onto neighborhood areas was a forerunner to the studies under the Chicago School of Sociology."}
{"text":"While taking part in the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, Du Bois presented a paper in which he rejected Frederick Douglass's plea for black Americans to integrate into white society. He wrote: \"we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland\". In the August 1897 issue of \"The Atlantic Monthly\", Du Bois published \"Strivings of the Negro People\", his first work aimed at the general public, in which he enlarged upon his thesis that African Americans should embrace their African heritage while contributing to American society."}
{"text":"In July 1897, Du Bois left Philadelphia and took a professorship in history and economics at the historically black Atlanta University in Georgia. His first major academic work was his book \"The Philadelphia Negro\" (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his fieldwork in 1896\u20131897. This breakthrough in scholarship was the first scientific study of African Americans and a major contribution to early scientific sociology in the U.S."}
{"text":"Du Bois coined the phrase \"the submerged tenth\" to describe the black underclass in the study. Later in 1903, he popularized the term, the \"Talented Tenth\", applied to society's elite class. His terminology reflected his opinion that the elite of a nation, both black and white, were critical to achievements in culture and progress. During this period he wrote dismissively of the underclass, describing them as \"lazy\" or \"unreliable\", but \u2013 in contrast to other scholars \u2013 he attributed many of their societal problems to the ravages of slavery."}
{"text":"Du Bois's output at Atlanta University was prodigious, in spite of a limited budget: he produced numerous social science papers and annually hosted the Atlanta Conference of Negro Problems. He also received grants from the U.S. government to prepare reports about African-American workforce and culture. His students considered him to be a brilliant, but aloof and strict, teacher."}
{"text":"Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London on 23\u221225 July 1900, shortly ahead of the Paris Exhibition of 1900 (\"to allow tourists of African descent to attend both events\".) The Conference had been organized by people from the Caribbean: Haitians Ant\u00e9nor Firmin and B\u00e9nito Sylvain and Trinidadian barrister Henry Sylvester Williams. Du Bois played a leading role in drafting a letter (\"Address to the Nations of the World\"), asking European leaders to struggle against racism, to grant colonies in Africa and the West Indies the right to self-government and to demand political and other rights for African Americans. By this time, southern states were passing new laws and constitutions to disfranchise most African Americans, an exclusion from the political system that lasted into the 1960s."}
{"text":"Du Bois was primary organizer of \"The Exhibit of American Negroes\" at the \"Exposition Universelle\" held in Paris between April and November 1900, for which he put together a series of 363 photographs aiming to commemorate the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century and challenge the racist caricatures and stereotypes of the day. Also included were charts, graphs, and maps. He was awarded a gold medal for his role as compiler of the materials, which are now housed at the Library of Congress."}
{"text":"Booker T. Washington and the Atlanta Compromise."}
{"text":"In the first decade of the new century, Du Bois emerged as a spokesperson for his race, second only to Booker T. Washington. Washington was the director of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and wielded tremendous influence within the African-American and white communities. Washington was the architect of the Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal that he had struck in 1895 with Southern white leaders who dominated state governments after Reconstruction. Essentially the agreement provided that Southern blacks, who overwhelmingly lived in rural communities, would submit to the current discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and non-unionized employment; that Southern whites would permit blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; and that Northern whites would invest in Southern enterprises and fund black educational charities."}
{"text":"Despite initially sending congratulations to Washington for his Atlanta Exposition Speech, Du Bois later came to oppose Washington's plan, along with many other African Americans, including Archibald H. Grimke, Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar \u2013 representatives of the class of educated blacks that Du Bois would later call the \"talented tenth\". Du Bois felt that African Americans should fight for equal rights and higher opportunities, rather than passively submit to the segregation and discrimination of Washington's Atlanta Compromise."}
{"text":"Du Bois was inspired to greater activism by the lynching of Sam Hose, which occurred near Atlanta in 1899. Hose was tortured, burned and hung by a mob of two thousand whites. When walking through Atlanta to discuss the lynching with newspaper editor Joel Chandler Harris, Du Bois encountered Hose's burned knuckles in a storefront display. The episode stunned Du Bois, and he resolved that \"one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved\". Du Bois realized that \"the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth\"."}
{"text":"The Niagarites held a second conference in August 1906, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's birth, at the West Virginia site of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Reverdy C. Ransom spoke, explaining that Washington's primary goal was to prepare blacks for employment in their current society: \"Today, two classes of Negroes, ... are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations; ... The other class believe that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place ... it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.\""}
{"text":"In an effort to portray the genius and humanity of the black race, Du Bois published \"The Souls of Black Folk\" (1903), a collection of 14 essays. James Weldon Johnson said the book's effect on African Americans was comparable to that of \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\". The introduction famously proclaimed that \"the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line\". Each chapter begins with two epigraphs \u2013 one from a white poet, and one from a black spiritual \u2013 to demonstrate intellectual and cultural parity between black and white cultures."}
{"text":"A major theme of the work was the double consciousness faced by African Americans: being both American and black. This was a unique identity which, according to Du Bois, had been a handicap in the past, but could be a strength in the future: \"Henceforth, the destiny of the race could be conceived as leading neither to assimilation nor separatism but to proud, enduring hyphenation.\""}
{"text":"Jonathon S. Kahn in \"Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of Du Bois\" shows how Du Bois, in his \"The Souls of Black Folk\", represents an exemplary text of pragmatic religious naturalism. On page 12 Kahn writes: \"Du Bois needs to be understood as an African American pragmatic religious naturalist. By this I mean that, like Du Bois the American traditional pragmatic religious naturalism, which runs through William James, George Santayana and John Dewey, seeks religion without metaphysical foundations.\" Kahn's interpretation of religious naturalism is very broad but he relates it to specific thinkers. Du Bois's anti-metaphysical viewpoint places him in the sphere of religious naturalism as typified by William James and others."}
{"text":"Du Bois wrote the essay, \"A Litany at Atlanta\", which asserted that the riot demonstrated that the Atlanta Compromise was a failure. Despite upholding their end of the bargain, blacks had failed to receive legal justice in the South. Historian David Levering Lewis has written that the Compromise no longer held because white patrician planters, who took a paternalistic role, had been replaced by aggressive businessmen who were willing to pit blacks against whites. These two calamities were watershed events for the African-American community, marking the ascendancy of Du Bois's vision of equal rights."}
{"text":"In addition to writing editorials, Du Bois continued to produce scholarly work at Atlanta University. In 1909, after five years of effort, he published a biography of abolitionist John Brown. It contained many insights, but also contained some factual errors. The work was strongly criticized by \"The Nation\", which was owned by Oswald Villard, who was writing his own, competing biography of John Brown. Possibly as a result, Du Bois's work was largely ignored by white scholars. After publishing a piece in \"Collier's\" magazine warning of the end of \"white supremacy\", Du Bois had difficulty getting pieces accepted by major periodicals, although he did continue to publish columns regularly in \"The Horizon\" magazine."}
{"text":"Du Bois was the first African American invited by the American Historical Association (AHA) to present a paper at their annual conference. He read his paper, \"Reconstruction and Its Benefits,\" to an astounded audience at the AHA's December 1909 conference. The paper went against the mainstream historical view, promoted by the Dunning School of scholars at Columbia University, that Reconstruction was a disaster, caused by the ineptitude and sloth of blacks. To the contrary, Du Bois asserted that the brief period of African-American leadership in the South accomplished three important goals: democracy, free public schools, and new social welfare legislation."}
{"text":"Du Bois asserted that it was the federal government's failure to manage the Freedmen's Bureau, to distribute land, and to establish an educational system, that doomed African-American prospects in the South. When Du Bois submitted the paper for publication a few months later in the \"American Historical Review\", he asked that the word Negro be capitalized. The editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused, and published the paper without the capitalization. The paper was mostly ignored by white historians. Du Bois later developed his paper as his ground-breaking 1935 book, \"Black Reconstruction,\" which marshaled extensive facts to support his assertions. The AHA did not invite another African-American speaker until 1940."}
{"text":"In May 1909, Du Bois attended the National Negro Conference in New York. The meeting led to the creation of the National Negro Committee, chaired by Oswald Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities. The following spring, in 1910, at the second National Negro Conference, the attendees created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At Du Bois's suggestion, the word \"colored\", rather than \"black\", was used to include \"dark skinned people everywhere\". Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, William English Walling, and its first president, Moorfield Storey."}
{"text":"Feeling inspired by this, Indian social reformer and civil rights activist Dr. B.R. Ambedkar contacted Du Bois in the 1940s. In a letter to Du Bois in 1946, he introduced himself as a member of the \"Untouchables of India\" and \"a student of the Negro problem\" and expressed his interest in the NAACP's petition to the U.N. He noted that his group was \"thinking of following suit\"; and requested copies of the proposed statement from Du Bois. In a letter dated July 31, 1946, Du Bois responded by telling Ambedkar he was familiar with his name, and that he had \"every sympathy with the Untouchables of India.\""}
{"text":"NAACP leaders offered Du Bois the position of Director of Publicity and Research. He accepted the job in the summer of 1910, and moved to New York after resigning from Atlanta University. His primary duty was editing the NAACP's monthly magazine, which he named \"The Crisis\". The first issue appeared in November 1910, and Du Bois wrote that its aim was to set out \"those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people\". The journal was phenomenally successful, and its circulation would reach 100,000 in 1920. Typical articles in the early editions polemics against the dishonesty and parochialism of black churches, and disussions on the Afrocentric origins of Egyptian civilization."}
{"text":"A 1911 Du Bois editorial helped initiate a nationwide push to induce the Federal government to outlaw lynching. Du Bois, employing the sarcasm he frequently used, commented on a lynching in Pennsylvania: \"The point is he was black. Blackness must be punished. Blackness is the crime of crimes ... It is therefore necessary, as every white scoundrel in the nation knows, to let slip no opportunity of punishing this crime of crimes. Of course if possible, the pretext should be great and overwhelming \u2013 some awful stunning crime, made even more horrible by the reporters' imagination. Failing this, mere murder, arson, barn burning or impudence may do.\""}
{"text":"\"The Crisis\" carried Du Bois editorials supporting the ideals of unionized labor but denouncing its leaders' racism; blacks were barred from membership. Du Bois also supported the principles of the Socialist Party (he held party membership from 1910 to 1912), but he denounced the racism demonstrated by some socialist leaders. Frustrated by Republican president Taft's failure to address widespread lynching, Du Bois endorsed Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential race, in exchange for Wilson's promise to support black causes."}
{"text":"During 1915 \u2212 1916, some leaders of the NAACP \u2013 disturbed by financial losses at \"The Crisis\", and worried about the inflammatory rhetoric of some of its essays \u2013 attempted to oust Du Bois from his editorial position. Du Bois and his supporters prevailed, and he continued in his role as editor. In a 1919 column titled \"The True Brownies\", he announced the creation of \"The Brownies' Book\", the first magazine published for African-American children and youth, which he founded with Augustus Granville Dill and Jessie Redmon Fauset."}
{"text":"The 1910s were a productive time for Du Bois. In 1911 he attended the First Universal Races Congress in London and he published his first novel, \"The Quest of the Silver Fleece.\" Two years later, Du Bois wrote, produced, and directed a pageant for the stage, \"The Star of Ethiopia\". In 1915, Du Bois published \"The Negro\", a general history of black Africans, and the first of its kind in English. The book rebutted claims of African inferiority, and would come to serve as the basis of much Afrocentric historiography in the 20th century. \"The Negro\" predicted unity and solidarity for colored people around the world, and it influenced many who supported the Pan-African movement."}
{"text":"In 1915, \"The Atlantic Monthly\" carried a Du Bois essay, \"The African Roots of the War\", which consolidated his ideas on capitalism and race. He argued that the scramble for Africa was at the root of World War I. He also anticipated later Communist doctrine, by suggesting that wealthy capitalists had pacified white workers by giving them just enough wealth to prevent them from revolting, and by threatening them with competition by the lower-cost labor of colored workers."}
{"text":"Du Bois used his influential NAACP position to oppose a variety of racist incidents. When the silent film \"The Birth of a Nation\" premiered in 1915, Du Bois and the NAACP led the fight to ban the movie, because of its racist portrayal of blacks as brutish and lustful. The fight was not successful, and possibly contributed to the film's fame, but the publicity drew many new supporters to the NAACP."}
{"text":"The private sector was not the only source of racism: under President Wilson, the plight of African Americans in government jobs suffered. Many federal agencies adopted whites-only employment practices, the Army excluded blacks from officer ranks, and the immigration service prohibited the immigration of persons of African ancestry. Du Bois wrote an editorial in 1914 deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts, and he supported William Monroe Trotter when Trotter brusquely confronted Wilson about the President's failure to fulfill his campaign promise of justice for blacks."}
{"text":"\"The Crisis\" continued to wage a campaign against lynching. In 1915, it published an article with a year-by-year tabulation of 2,732 lynchings from 1884 to 1914. The April 1916 edition covered the group lynching of six African Americans in Lee County, Georgia. Later in 1916, the \"Waco Horror\" article covered the lynching of Jesse Washington, a mentally impaired 17-year-old African American. The article broke new ground by utilizing undercover reporting to expose the conduct of local whites in Waco, Texas."}
{"text":"The early 20th century was the era of the Great Migration of blacks from the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Du Bois wrote an editorial supporting the Great Migration, because he felt it would help blacks escape Southern racism, find economic opportunities, and assimilate into American society."}
{"text":"Also in the 1910s the American eugenics movement was in its infancy, and many leading eugenicists were openly racist, defining Blacks as \"a lower race\". Du Bois opposed this view as an unscientific aberration, but still maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the \"stocks\" of humanity."}
{"text":"The Houston riot of 1917 disturbed Du Bois and was a major setback to efforts to permit African Americans to become military officers. The riot began after Houston police arrested and beat two black soldiers; in response, over 100 black soldiers took to the streets of Houston and killed 16 whites. A military court martial was held, and 19 of the soldiers were hung, and 67 others were imprisoned. In spite of the Houston riot, Du Bois and others successfully pressed the Army to accept the officers trained at Spingarn's camp, resulting in over 600 black officers joining the Army in October 1917."}
{"text":"When the war ended, Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1919 to attend the first Pan-African Congress and to interview African-American soldiers for a planned book on their experiences in World War I. He was trailed by U.S. agents who were searching for evidence of treasonous activities. Du Bois discovered that the vast majority of black American soldiers were relegated to menial labor as stevedores and laborers. Some units were armed, and one in particular, the 92nd Division (the Buffalo soldiers), engaged in combat. Du Bois discovered widespread racism in the Army, and concluded that the Army command discouraged African Americans from joining the Army, discredited the accomplishments of black soldiers, and promoted bigotry."}
{"text":"In 1920, Du Bois published \"\", the first of his three autobiographies. The \"veil\" was that which covered colored people around the world. In the book, he hoped to lift the veil and show white readers what life was like behind the veil, and how it distorted the viewpoints of those looking through it \u2013 in both directions. The book contained Du Bois's feminist essay, \"The Damnation of Women\", which was a tribute to the dignity and worth of women, particularly black women."}
{"text":"Concerned that textbooks used by African-American children ignored black history and culture, Du Bois created a monthly children's magazine, \"The Brownies' Book\". Initially published in 1920, it was aimed at black children, who Du Bois called \"the children of the sun\"."}
{"text":"Du Bois traveled to Europe in 1921 to attend the second Pan-African Congress. The assembled black leaders from around the world issued the \"London Resolutions\" and established a Pan-African Association headquarters in Paris. Under Du Bois's guidance, the resolutions insisted on racial equality, and that Africa be ruled \"by\" Africans (not, as in the 1919 congress, with the \"consent\" of Africans). Du Bois restated the resolutions of the congress in his \"Manifesto To the League of Nations\", which implored the newly formed League of Nations to address labor issues and to appoint Africans to key posts. The League took little action on the requests."}
{"text":"Another important African-American leader of the 1920s was Marcus Garvey, promoter of the Back-to-Africa movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey denounced Du Bois's efforts to achieve equality through integration, and instead endorsed racial separatism. Du Bois initially supported the concept of Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping company that was intended to facilitate commerce within the African diaspora. But Du Bois later became concerned that Garvey was threatening the NAACP's efforts, leading Du Bois to describe him as fraudulent and reckless. Responding to Garvey's slogan \"Africa for the Africans\", Du Bois said that he supported that concept, but denounced Garvey's intention that Africa be ruled by African Americans."}
{"text":"Du Bois wrote a series of articles in \"The Crisis\" between 1922 and 1924 attacking Garvey's movement, calling him the \"most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and the world.\" Du Bois and Garvey never made a serious attempt to collaborate, and their dispute was partly rooted in the desire of their respective organizations (NAACP and UNIA) to capture a larger portion of the available philanthropic funding."}
{"text":"When Du Bois became editor of \"The Crisis\" magazine in 1911, he joined the Socialist Party of America on the advice of NAACP founders Mary Ovington, William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell. However, he supported the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential campaign, a breach of the rules, and was forced to resign from the Socialist Party. In 1913, his support for Wilson was shaken when racial segregation in government hiring was reported. Du Bois remained \"convinced that socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods.\""}
{"text":"Nine years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Du Bois extended a trip to Europe to include a visit to the Soviet Union, where he was struck by the poverty and disorganization he encountered in the Soviet Union, yet was impressed by the intense labors of the officials and by the recognition given to workers. Although Du Bois was not yet familiar with the communist theories of Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, he concluded that socialism might be a better path towards racial equality than capitalism."}
{"text":"Although Du Bois generally endorsed socialist principles, his politics were strictly pragmatic: in 1929, he endorsed Democrat Jimmy Walker for mayor of New York, rather than the socialist Norman Thomas, believing that Walker could do more immediate good for blacks, even though Thomas's platform was more consistent with Du Bois's views. Throughout the 1920s, Du Bois and the NAACP shifted support back and forth between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, induced by promises from the candidates to fight lynchings, improve working conditions, or support voting rights in the South; invariably, the candidates failed to deliver on their promises."}
{"text":"Du Bois did not have a good working relationship with Walter Francis White, president of the NAACP since 1931. That conflict, combined with the financial stresses of the Great Depression, precipitated a power struggle over \"The Crisis\". Du Bois, concerned that his position as editor would be eliminated, resigned his job at \"The Crisis\" and accepted an academic position at Atlanta University in early 1933. The rift with the NAACP grew larger in 1934 when Du Bois reversed his stance on segregation, stating that \"separate but equal\" was an acceptable goal for African Americans. The NAACP leadership was stunned, and asked Du Bois to retract his statement, but he refused, and the dispute led to Du Bois's resignation from the NAACP."}
{"text":"The book's thesis ran counter to the orthodox interpretation of Reconstruction maintained by white historians, and the book was virtually ignored by mainstream historians until the 1960s. Thereafter, however, it ignited a \"revisionist\" trend in the historiography of Reconstruction, which emphasized black people's search for freedom and the era's radical policy changes. By the 21st century, \"Black Reconstruction\" was widely perceived as \"the foundational text of revisionist African American historiography.\""}
{"text":"In the final chapter of the book, \"XIV. The Propaganda of History\", Du Bois evokes his efforts at writing an article for the \"Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica\" on the \"history of the American Negro\". After the editors had cut all reference to Reconstruction, he insisted that the following note appear in the entry: \"White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools.\" The editors refused and, so, Du Bois withdrew his article."}
{"text":"In 1932, Du Bois was selected by several philanthropies, including the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the General Education Board, to be the managing editor for a proposed \"Encyclopedia of the Negro\", a work which Du Bois had been contemplating for 30 years. After several years of planning and organizing, the philanthropies canceled the project in 1938 because some board members believed that Du Bois was too biased to produce an objective encyclopedia."}
{"text":"Du Bois took a trip around the world in 1936, which included visits to Nazi Germany, China and Japan. While in Germany, Du Bois remarked that he was treated with warmth and respect. After his return to the United States, he expressed his ambivalence about the Nazi regime. He admired how the Nazis had improved the German economy, but he was horrified by their treatment of the Jewish people, which he described as \"an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.\""}
{"text":"Following the 1905 Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Du Bois became impressed by the growing strength of Imperial Japan. He came to view the ascendant Japanese Empire as an antidote to Western imperialism, arguing over for over three decades after the war that its rise represented a chance to break the monopoly that white nations had on international affairs. A representative of Japan's \"Negro Propaganda Operations\" traveled to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, meeting with Du Bois and giving him a positive impression of Imperial Japan's racial policies."}
{"text":"In 1936, the Japanese ambassador arranged a trip to Japan for Du Bois and a small group of academics, visiting China, Japan, and Manchukuo (Manchuria). Du Bois viewed Japanese colonialism in Manchuria as benevolent; he wrote that \"colonial enterprise by a colored nation need not imply the caste, exploitation and subjection which is has always implied in the case of white Europe.\" While disturbed by the eventual Japanese alliance with Nazi Germany, Du Bois also argued Japan was only compelled to enter the pact because of the hostility of the United States and United Kingdom, and he viewed American apprehensions over Japanese expansion in Asia as racially motivated both before and after the Attack on Pearl Harbor."}
{"text":"Du Bois opposed the US intervention in World War II, particularly in the Pacific, because he believed that China and Japan were emerging from the clutches of white imperialists. He felt that the European Allies waging war against Japan was an opportunity for whites to reestablish their influence in Asia. He was deeply disappointed by the US government's plan for African Americans in the armed forces: Blacks were limited to 5.8% of the force, and there were to be no African-American combat units \u2013 virtually the same restrictions as in World War I. With blacks threatening to shift their support to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the 1940 election, Roosevelt appointed a few blacks to leadership posts in the military."}
{"text":"\"Dusk of Dawn\", Du Bois's second autobiography, was published in 1940. The title refers to his hope that African Americans were passing out of the darkness of racism into an era of greater equality. The work is part autobiography, part history, and part sociological treatise. Du Bois described the book as \"the autobiography of a concept of race ... elucidated and magnified and doubtless distorted in the thoughts and deeds which were mine ... Thus for all time my life is significant for all lives of men.\""}
{"text":"In 1943, at age 75, Du Bois was abruptly fired from his position at Atlanta University by college president Rufus Clement. Many scholars expressed outrage, prompting Atlanta University to provide Du Bois with a lifelong pension and the title of professor emeritus. Arthur Spingarn remarked that Du Bois spent his time in Atlanta \"battering his life out against ignorance, bigotry, intolerance and slothfulness, projecting ideas nobody but he understands, and raising hopes for change which may be comprehended in a hundred years.\""}
{"text":"Turning down job offers from Fisk and Howard, Du Bois re-joined the NAACP as director of the Department of Special Research. Surprising many NAACP leaders, Du Bois jumped into the job with vigor and determination. During his 10\u2212years hiatus, the NAACP's income had increased fourfold, and its membership had soared to 325,000 members."}
{"text":"Du Bois was a member of the three-person delegation from the NAACP that attended the 1945 conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established. The NAACP delegation wanted the United Nations to endorse racial equality and to bring an end to the colonial era. To push the United Nations in that direction, Du Bois drafted a proposal that pronounced \"[t]he colonial system of government ... is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars\". The NAACP proposal received support from China, India, and the Soviet Union, but it was virtually ignored by the other major powers, and the NAACP proposals were not included in the final United Nations charter."}
{"text":"After the United Nations conference, Du Bois published \"Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace\", a book that attacked colonial empires and, in the words of one reviewer, \"contains enough dynamite to blow up the whole vicious system whereby we have comforted our white souls and lined the pockets of generations of free-booting capitalists.\""}
{"text":"In late 1945, Du Bois attended the fifth, and final, Pan-African Congress, in Manchester, England. The congress was the most productive of the five congresses, and there Du Bois met Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana, who would later invite him to Africa."}
{"text":"Du Bois helped to submit petitions to the UN concerning discrimination against African Americans, the most noteworthy of which was the NAACP's \"An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress\". This advocacy laid the foundation for the later report and petition called \"We Charge Genocide\", submitted in 1951 by the Civil Rights Congress. \"We Charge Genocide\" accuses the U.S. of systematically sanctioning murders and inflicting harm against African Americans and therefore committing genocide."}
{"text":"Du Bois was a lifelong anti-war activist, but his efforts became more pronounced after World War II. In 1949, Du Bois spoke at the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in New York: \"I tell you, people of America, the dark world is on the move! It wants and will have Freedom, Autonomy and Equality. It will not be diverted in these fundamental rights by dialectical splitting of political hairs ... Whites may, if they will, arm themselves for suicide. But the vast majority of the world's peoples will march on over them to freedom!\""}
{"text":"In the spring of 1949, he spoke at the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace in Paris, saying to the large crowd: \"Leading this new colonial imperialism comes my own native land built by my father's toil and blood, the United States. The United States is a great nation; rich by grace of God and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens ... Drunk with power we are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery which once ruined us; and to a third World War which will ruin the world.\""}
{"text":"Du Bois affiliated himself with a leftist organization, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions, and he traveled to Moscow as its representative to speak at the All-Soviet Peace Conference in late 1949."}
{"text":"During the 1950s, the U.S. government's anti-communist McCarthyism campaign targeted Du Bois because of his socialist leanings. Historian Manning Marable characterizes the government's treatment of Du Bois as \"ruthless repression\" and a \"political assassination\"."}
{"text":"The FBI began to compile a file on Du Bois in 1942, investigating him for possible subversive activities. The original investigation appears to have ended in 1943 because the FBI was unable to discover sufficient evidence against Du Bois, but the FBI resumed its investigation in 1949, suspecting he was among a group of \"Concealed Communists\". The most aggressive government attack against Du Bois occurred in the early 1950s, as a consequence of his opposition to nuclear weapons. In 1950 he became chair of the newly created Peace Information Center (PIC), which worked to publicize the Stockholm Peace Appeal in the United States. The primary purpose of the appeal was to gather signatures on a petition, asking governments around the world to ban all nuclear weapons."}
{"text":"In , the U.S. Justice Department alleged that the PIC was acting as an agent of a foreign state, and thus required the PIC to register with the federal government. Du Bois and other PIC leaders refused, and they were indicted for failure to register. After the indictment, some of Du Bois's associates distanced themselves from him, and the NAACP refused to issue a statement of support; but many labor figures and leftists \u2013 including Langston Hughes \u2013 supported Du Bois."}
{"text":"He was finally tried in 1951 and was represented by civil rights attorney Vito Marcantonio. The case was dismissed before the jury rendered a verdict as soon as the defense attorney told the judge that \"Dr. Albert Einstein has offered to appear as character witness for Dr. Du Bois\". Du Bois's memoir of the trial is \"In Battle for Peace\". Even though Du Bois was not convicted, the government confiscated Du Bois's passport and withheld it for eight years."}
{"text":"Du Bois was bitterly disappointed that many of his colleaguesparticularly the NAACPdid not support him during his 1951 PIC trial, whereas working class whites and blacks supported him enthusiastically. After the trial, Du Bois lived in Manhattan, writing and speaking, and continuing to associate primarily with leftist acquaintances. His primary concern was world peace, and he railed against military actions such as the Korean War, which he viewed as efforts by imperialist whites to maintain colored people in a submissive state."}
{"text":"The U.S. government prevented Du Bois from attending the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The conference was the culmination of 40 years of Du Bois's dreams \u2013 a meeting of 29 nations from Africa and Asia, many recently independent, representing most of the world's colored peoples. The conference celebrated those nations' independence as they began to assert their power as non-aligned nations during the Cold War."}
{"text":"Du Bois regained his passport in 1958, and with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, he traveled around the world, visiting Russia and China. In both countries he was celebrated. Du Bois later wrote approvingly of the conditions in both countries."}
{"text":"Du Bois became incensed in 1961 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1950 McCarran Act, a key piece of McCarthyism legislation which required Communists to register with the government. To demonstrate his outrage, he joined the Communist Party in October 1961, at the age of 93. Around that time, he wrote: \"I believe in Communism. I mean by Communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part.\" He asked Herbert Aptheker, a Communist and historian of African-American history, to be his literary executor."}
{"text":"Nkrumah invited Du Bois to Ghana to participate in their independence celebration in 1957, but he was unable to attend because the U.S. government had confiscated his passport in 1951. By 1960the \"Year of Africa\"Du Bois had recovered his passport, and was able to cross the Atlantic and celebrate the creation of the Republic of Ghana. Du Bois returned to Africa in late 1960 to attend the inauguration of Nnamdi Azikiwe as the first African governor of Nigeria."}
{"text":"While visiting Ghana in 1960, Du Bois spoke with its president about the creation of a new encyclopedia of the African diaspora, the \"Encyclopedia Africana\". In early 1961, Ghana notified Du Bois that they had appropriated funds to support the encyclopedia project, and they invited him to travel to Ghana and manage the project there. In October 1961, at the age of 93, Du Bois and his wife traveled to Ghana to take up residence and commence work on the encyclopedia. In early 1963, the United States refused to renew his passport, so he made the symbolic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana."}
{"text":"While it is sometimes stated that Du Bois renounced his U.S. citizenship at that time, and he stated his intention to do so, Du Bois never actually did. His health declined during the two years he was in Ghana, and he died on August 27, 1963, in the capital of Accra at the age of 95. The following day, at the March on Washington, speaker Roy Wilkins asked the hundreds of thousands of marchers to honor Du Bois with a moment of silence. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms Du Bois had campaigned for during his entire life, was enacted almost a year after his death."}
{"text":"Du Bois was given a state funeral on August 29\u201330, 1963, at Nkrumah's request, and was buried near the western wall of Christiansborg Castle (now Osu Castle), then the seat of government in Accra. In 1985, another state ceremony honored Du Bois. With the ashes of his wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, who had died in 1977, his body was re-interred at their former home in Accra, which was dedicated the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture in his memory. Du Bois's first wife Nina, their son Burghardt, and their daughter Yolande, who died in 1961, were buried in the cemetery of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, his hometown."}
{"text":"Du Bois married Nina Gomer (b. about 1870, m. 1896, d. 1950), with whom he had two children. Their son Burghardt died as an infant before their second child, daughter Yolande, was born. Yolande attended Fisk University and became a high school teacher in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father encouraged her marriage to Countee Cullen, a nationally known poet of the Harlem Renaissance. They divorced within two years. She married again and had a daughter, Du Bois's only grandchild. That marriage also ended in divorce."}
{"text":"As a widower, Du Bois married Shirley Graham (m. 1951, d. 1977), an author, playwright, composer, and activist. She brought her son David Graham to the marriage. David grew close to Du Bois and took his stepfather's name; he also worked for African-American causes. The historian David Levering Lewis wrote that Du Bois engaged in several extramarital relationships."}
{"text":"Although Du Bois attended a New England Congregational church as a child, he abandoned organized religion while at Fisk College. As an adult, Du Bois described himself as agnostic or a freethinker, but at least one biographer concluded that Du Bois was virtually an atheist. However, another analyst of Du Bois's writings concluded that he had a religious voice, albeit radically different from other African-American religious voices of his era. Du Bois was credited with inaugurating a 20th-century spirituality to which Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin also belong."}
{"text":"When asked to lead public prayers, Du Bois would refuse. In his autobiography, Du Bois wrote:"}
{"text":"Du Bois accused American churches of being the most discriminatory of all institutions. He also provocatively linked African-American Christianity to indigenous African religions. He did occasionally acknowledge the beneficial role that religion played in African-American life \u2013 as the \"basic rock\" which served as an anchor for African-American communities \u2013 but in general disparaged African-American churches and clergy because he felt they did not support the goals of racial equality and hindered activists' efforts."}
{"text":"Although Du Bois was not personally religious, he infused his writings with religious symbology. Many contemporaries viewed him as a prophet. His 1904 prose poem, \"Credo\", was written in the style of a religious creed and widely read by the African-American community. Moreover, Du Bois, both in his own fiction and in stories published in \"The Crisis\", often drew analogies between the lynchings of African Americans and the crucifixion of Christ. Between 1920 and 1940, Du Bois shifted from overt black messiah symbolism to more subtle messianic language."}
{"text":"In 1889, Du Bois became eligible to vote at the age of 21. During his life he followed the philosophy of voting for third parties if the Democratic and Republican parties were unsatisfactory; or voting for the lesser of two evils if a third option was not available."}
{"text":"From 1932 to 1944, Du Bois supported Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic nominee, as Roosevelt's attitude towards workers was more realistic. During the 1948 presidential election he supported Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive nominee, and supported the Progressives\u2019 nominee, Vincent Hallinan, again in 1952."}
{"text":"During the 1956 presidential election Du Bois stated that he would not vote. He criticized the foreign, taxation, and crime policies of the Eisenhower administration and Adlai Stevenson II for promising to maintain those policies. However, he could not vote third party due to the lack of ballot access for the Socialist Party."}
{"text":"The W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst contains Du Bois's archive, 294 boxes, 89 microfilm reels. 99,625 items have been digitized."}
{"text":"William Leo Hansberry (February 25, 1894 \u2013 November 3, 1965) was an American scholar and lecturer. He was the older brother of real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry, uncle of award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry and great-granduncle of actress Taye Hansberry."}
{"text":"Hansberry was born on February 25, 1894, in Gloster, Amite County, Mississippi. He was the son of Elden Hayes and Pauline (Bailey) Hansberry. His father taught history at Alcorn A&M in Lorman, Mississippi, but died when the younger Hansberry was only three years old. He and his younger brother, Carl Augustus Hansberry, were raised by their stepfather, Elijah Washington."}
{"text":"In 1915, he attended Atlanta University, where he was exposed to a new volume of essays on race (published by the university's Sociology Department), which served as a major influence on him. Another big influence was the book, \"The Negro\" by W. E. B. Du Bois. After he purchased a copy of the book, he rushed to the school's library to refer to the references cited in the volume. To his dismay, Hansberry discovered Atlanta University's reference library to be sorely lacking. As a result, he left Atlanta University two weeks into his sophomore year to transfer to the best-equipped university he could find that would admit blacks. As a result, he began studies at Harvard University in February 1917; he completed his undergraduate studies there in 1921."}
{"text":"Upon his graduation from Harvard, Hansberry taught for a year at Straight College (now Dillard University) in New Orleans. In September 1922, Hansberry joined the faculty of Howard University where he started the African Civilization Section of the History Department."}
{"text":"Hansberry received his Masters from Harvard in 1932. Additional post-graduate work was done at the University of Chicago, Oxford University and Cairo University. His knowledge of African studies was so vast that he was unable to obtain a Ph.D. because there was no school with faculty members qualified to supervise his dissertation."}
{"text":"As a professor at Howard, Hansberry taught courses on African civilizations and cultures. By the mid-1930s, he was internationally recognized by his peers as an outstanding scholar in his field. Among his students were two future African leaders. One was the future Ghanaian revolutionary, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah would later become the first prime minister and president of Ghana. The other was Nnamdi Azikiwe, who studied anthropology under him from 1928 to 1929 and wrote a eulogy for him. Azikiwe would become the first president of Nigeria. In 1961, then-Nigerian Governor-General Azikiwe thought Hansberry's work so important that he offered to underwrite the publication of his major work, \"The Rise and Decline of the Ethiopian Empire\"."}
{"text":"Although Hansberry's courses were very popular with students, two distinguished faculty members accused Hansberry of teaching subject matter without adequate research to support it. With the program and his job on the line, Hansberry presented the Board of Trustees with detailed documentation of his research. While he managed to save the African studies program, Hansberry's research funding was cut off and he would not receive tenure until 1938."}
{"text":"Despite the extensive research he conducted over his lifetime, Hansberry was very reluctant to have his work published. James Williams, one of his former students and later a Senior Professor of African History at Howard, recalled in 1972 that when his students urged publication of his work, Hansberry would smile, but always firmly reply, \"I am not ready yet.\" Hansberry retired from Howard in June 1959."}
{"text":"He married Myrtle Kelso (September 24, 1908\u2014May 1980) of Meridian, Lauderdale County, Mississippi, on June 22, 1937, in Chicago. She is the daughter of Wiley and Mamie Kelso. Two children were born to this union:"}
{"text":"While visiting relatives in Chicago, Hansberry died at Billings Hospital of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 3, 1965."}
{"text":"In 1972, he finally received recognition from the university that had snubbed him when Howard named a lecture hall in his honor."}
{"text":"William Leo Hansberry was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity."}
{"text":"Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She withdrew from the party."}
{"text":"While in Los Angeles, Brown enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles. She later went on to briefly attend Mills College and Southwestern University School of Law."}
{"text":"In 1968, Brown joined the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member, studying revolutionary literature, selling Black Panther Party newspapers, and cleaning guns, among other tasks. She soon helped the Party set up its first Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles, as well as the Party's initial Free Busing to Prisons Program and Free Legal Aid Program."}
{"text":"In 1968, Brown was commissioned by David Hilliard, the Party chief of staff, to record her songs, a request resulting in the album \"Seize the Time\". She eventually assumed the role of editor of \"the\" \"Black Panther\" publication in the Southern California Branch of the Party. In 1971, Brown became a member of the Party's Central Committee as Minister of Information, replacing the expelled Eldridge Cleaver. In 1973, Brown was commissioned to record more songs by Black Panther Party founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton. These songs resulted in the album \"Until We're Free\"."}
{"text":"As part of a directive by Newton, Brown unsuccessfully ran for the Oakland city council in 1973, getting 30 percent of the vote. She ran again in 1975, losing again with 44 percent of the vote. When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 to avoid criminal charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Black Panther Party. Brown was the only woman to do so. She chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her 1992 memoir, \"A Taste of Power\", she wrote about the experience:"}
{"text":"\"A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people... I knew I would have to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party\". She dealt with regular sexism because the men were angered by the thought of taking orders from a woman."}
{"text":"During Brown's leadership of the Black Panther Party, she focused on electoral politics and community service. In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson\u2019s victorious campaign to become Oakland\u2019s first black mayor. Also, Brown founded the Panther's Liberation School, which was recognized by the state of California as a model school."}
{"text":"Brown stepped down from chairing the Black Panther Party less than a year after Newton\u2019s return from Cuba in 1977 when Newton refused to condemn the beating of Regina Davis, an administrator of the Panther Liberation School. Other male members of the party beat her and broke her jaw because she reprimanded a coworker when he did not do an assignment. Newton opted for solidarity with the men. This incident was the point at which Brown could no longer tolerate the sexism and patriarchy of the Black Panther Party. For many, Brown's leaving was seen as a turning point for the Party. She left Oakland with her daughter, Ericka, and moved to Los Angeles."}
{"text":"Brown recorded two albums, \"Seize the Time\" (Vault, 1969) and \"Until We're Free\" (Motown Records, 1973). \"Seize the Time\" includes \"The Meeting,\" the anthem of the Black Panther Party."}
{"text":"After leaving the Black Panther Party in order to raise her daughter Ericka, Brown worked on her memoir, \"A Taste of Power\". She eventually returned to the struggle for black liberation, especially espousing the need for radical prison reform. From 1980 to 1983, she attended Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles."}
{"text":"In 2003, Brown co-founded the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, which helps thousands of prisoners find housing after they are released on parole, facilitates transportation for family visits to prisons, helps prisoners find employment, and raises money for prisoner phone calls and gifts."}
{"text":"Brown has continued her prison reform advocacy by lecturing frequently at colleges and universities in the US. Since 1995, she has lectured at more than forty colleges and universities, as well as numerous conferences."}
{"text":"In 2010, inmates in more than seven Georgia prisons used contraband cellphones to organize a nonviolent strike for better prison conditions, Brown became their \"closest adviser outside prison walls.\" She \"helped distill the inmate complaints into a list of demands. She held a conference call... to develop a strategy with various groups, including the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam.\""}
{"text":"Brown has one daughter, Ericka Abram, fathered by Black Panther member Raymond Hewitt, but he was mostly absent from his daughter's life. At Hewitt's funeral, Elaine Brown was in attendance."}
{"text":"Cecelia Antoinette Bruton (November 24, 1949 \u2013 May 28, 2020), known professionally as Cecelia Antoinette or CeCe Antoinette, was an American actress, comedian, and writer."}
{"text":"Cecelia Antoinette Bruton was born a twin in Dallas, in 1949, the daughter of Cicero Hamilton Bruton Sr. and Naomi Hartman Bruton. Her mother was an actress, and her father worked for the railroad. She was educated in Hamilton Park schools, graduating from high school in 1968. She earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Oklahoma. She was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha."}
{"text":"Bruton began acting in Dallas and took acting classes in New York City. She appeared on Broadway in \"Mule Bone\", and in touring or regional companies of \"The Wake of Jeremy Foster\", \"The Member of the Wedding\", \"The Ride Down Mt. Morgan\", \"St. Lucy's Eyes,\" and \"Bronzeville\". On television, she had small roles in , \"Scrubs, Weeds, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Godfather of Harlem, The Punisher,\" \"A Black Lady Sketch Show, Blue Bloods, 2 Broke Girls,\" \"Mad Men\", \"Desperate Housewives\", \"Girlfriends\", \"Crossing Jordan\", and \"The Chris Rock Show\". Her film credits included appearances in \"After School\" (2008), \"Proud American\" (2008), \"Yes Man\" (2008), \"Dance Fu\" (2011), \"Different Flowers\" (2017), and \"Deadtectives\" (2018)."}
{"text":"Bruton published a book of poetry, \"Just as I am\", and a memoir, \"Brown Gal's Rising\", and an autobiographical one-woman show, \"Watermelon: Git It While It's Hot!\". She participated in the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in 1998, and performed at festivals about women in jazz in Hartford in 1999 and 2001. She was a member of the Women's Project Directors Forum. She taught theatre at various levels, including at the Pennsylvania State University and the New York City public schools."}
{"text":"Cecelia Antoinette Bruton was a practicing Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist."}
{"text":"She died in 2020, aged 70 years. She was honored posthumously at the Reel Sisters awards ceremony in November 2020."}
{"text":"Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad (born Richard Earl Moore; 1944) is an American writer and activist, who is a former political prisoner, Black Panther Party leader, and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army. \"Dhoruba\", in Swahili, means \"the storm\"."}
{"text":"On May 19, 1971, Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti, two New York City Police Department officers who were guarding the home of Frank S. Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, were fired upon in a drive-by shooting, with a machine gun. The officers survived, but were seriously injured, sustaining shots to the head, neck, chest, and abdomen."}
{"text":"The shootings took place during a period of intense violence between black activist organizations and the New York City police department. Two days later, NYPD officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini were shot and killed outside a housing project in Harlem."}
{"text":"Wahad was arrested and initially charged with robbing a South Bronx social club, and then was later charged with the attempted murders of Curry and Binetti."}
{"text":"Wahad's first trial ended in a hung jury; his second in a mistrial. Two years later, in 1973, his third trial resulted in a guilty verdict; he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life."}
{"text":"Wahad spent a total of nineteen years in prison. While incarcerated, he learned about Congressional hearings that disclosed the existence of a covert F.B.I. operation known as COINTELPRO. In December 1975 he filed a lawsuit against the F.B.I. and the police department of the City of New York."}
{"text":"As a direct result of his lawsuit, over the next fifteen years the F.B.I. released more than 300,000 pages of documents regarding COINTELPRO. The COINTELPRO documents were the basis on which Wahad appealed his conviction, and on March 15, 1990, Judge Peter J. McQuillan of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan reversed it, ruling that the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence that could have helped Mr. Wahad's defense."}
{"text":"While Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau stated that he planned to appeal the ruling, and would obtain a retrial if his appeal failed, Wahad was freed and released without bail."}
{"text":"Morgenthau's attempt to appeal was rejected by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, and on January 20, 1995, the Manhattan district attorney's office stated there would be no retrial, indicating that the current condition of the evidence would make this impossible."}
{"text":"In 1995, the F.B.I. settled with Wahad; the U.S. government paid him $400,000."}
{"text":"On December 4, 2000, Dhoruba's suit against the New York Police Department, seeking $15 million in damages was scheduled to begin. On December 8, 2000, the city of New York laid to rest a 25-year legal battle, and agreed to pay Wahad an additional $490,000 in damages."}
{"text":"Wahad lived in Accra, Ghana, where he organized on Pan-Africanism and the prison system. Using the funds from his settlements for personal damages from the FBI and City of New York, he established the Campaign to Free Black and New African Political Prisoners (formerly the Campaign to Free Black Political Prisoners and Prisoners-of-War) and founded the Institute for the Development of Pan-African policy in Ghana."}
{"text":"He currently lives in New York City and continues his work."}
{"text":"On August 19, 2015, Bin Wahad and an associate were assaulted by a faction of the New Black Panther Party. Bin Wahad had been attending a conference in Atlanta, Georgia held by the Nzinga faction of the \"New\" Panthers, where Bin Wahad confronted the group about their adoption of the Black Panther name and their rhetoric. The two were ordered to leave but when they refused, Bin Wahad was assaulted. Wahad was left with a concussion, a broken jaw and lacerations from the attack. The event led founding member of the original Black Panthers, Elbert \"Big Man\" Howard, to denounce the group as \"reactionaries\" and \"thugs\"."}
{"text":"Barbara Cottman Becnel (born May 30, 1950) is an American author, journalist, and film producer. She was a close friend and advocate for Crips co-founder Stanley Williams (aka \"Stan Tookie Williams\"; a convicted murderer and former gang leader who would later become an anti-gang activist and writer), and editor of Williams's series of children's books, which spoke out against gang violence. Williams was executed in 2005. Becnel co-produced the Golden Globe-nominated film \"\", which starred award-winning actress Lynn Whitfield playing the role of Becnel."}
{"text":"Becnel was in attendance at Williams' execution as one of his chosen witnesses. After he was pronounced dead, she, along with two of his friends, television executive Shirley Neal and movie producer Rudy Langlais, stood up and yelled that California had executed an innocent man. After the execution, she said \"We are going to prove his innocence, and when we do, we are going to show that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is, in fact, himself a cold blooded murderer.\""}
{"text":"Williams directed Becnel to make the arrangements for his funeral, which was held at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on December 20, 2005. More than 3,000 people attended Williams' memorial service. On Sunday, June 25, 2006, Becnel and Neal released Williams' ashes into a lake in Thokoza Park, located in the black township of Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa. In February 2009, Becnel and Neal released \"Tribute: Stanley Tookie Williams, 1953-2005\", a documentary they directed and produced about Williams."}
{"text":"Announcing her intention to defeat Schwarzenegger in the upcoming gubernatorial election, Becnel ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for Governor of California in 2006, the first black female to do so. She finished with 66,544 votes overall, which amounted to 2.7% of all ballots cast, coming in third out of eight Democrats behind Phil Angelides and Steve Westly. Her campaign attracted media attention, and she raised enough money in the last week of the campaign to run television and radio commercials."}
{"text":"She publicly denounced Democratic Gubernatorial candidates Phil Angelides and Steve Westly for supporting the death penalty. She is also outspoken on other social issues, such as the environment and immigration. Barbara's outspoken criticism of Angelides and Westly resulted in her not being invited to a number of key Democratic Party events during the general election season. This, coupled with differences over issues such as the death penalty, led Barbara to leave the Democratic Party. In the first weeks of 2007 Barbara left the Democratic Party and joined the Green Party of California, the state affiliate of the Green Party (GPUS). When asked why she joined the Green Party, Becnel responded, \"The Green Party is right on the issues--no ifs, ands, or buts.\""}
{"text":"Shirley Graham Du Bois (born Lola Shirley Graham Jr.; November 11, 1896 \u2013 March 27, 1977) was an American author, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works."}
{"text":"She was born Lola Shirley Graham Jr. in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1896, as the only daughter among five children. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and the family moved often due to her fathers work in parsonages throughout the country. In June 1915, Shirley graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington."}
{"text":"She married her first husband, Shadrach T. McCants, in 1921. Their son Robert was born in 1923, followed by David Graham DuBois in 1925. In 1926, Graham moved to Paris, France, to study music composition at the Sorbonne. She thought that this education might allow her to achieve better employment and be able to better support her children. Meeting Africans and Afro-Caribbean people in Paris introduced her to new music and cultures. Shirley and Shadrach divorced in 1927."}
{"text":"Graham served as music librarian while attending Howard University as a nonmatriculated student under the tutelage of Professor Roy W. Tibbs. He recommended her for a teaching position at Morgan College which led to her position as head of the music department from 1929 to 1931."}
{"text":"In 1931, Graham entered Oberlin College as an advanced student and, after earning her B.A. in 1934, went on to do graduate work in music, completing a master's degree in 1935. In 1936, Hallie Flanagan appointed Graham director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theater Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. She wrote musical scores, directed, and did additional associated work."}
{"text":"Shirley Graham Du Bois composed the opera \"Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro\" which premiered in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, commissioned by the Stadium Opera Company. Tom Tom featured an all Black cast and orchestra, structured in three acts; act one taking place in an Indigenous African tribe, act two portraying an American Slave plantation, and the final act taking place in 1920s Harlem. The music features elements of blues and spirituals, as well as jazz with elements of opera. The score of this opera was considered lost and has not been performed since its premiere until it was rediscovered in 2001 at Harvard University."}
{"text":"In the late 1940s, Graham became a member of Sojourners for Truth and Justicean African-American organization working for global women's liberation. Around the same time, she joined the American Communist Party."}
{"text":"Shirley Graham Du Bois attended the Second Summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Cairo in 1964 and consulted with Malcom X on the efforts of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) to get support for the issues inside the U.S. among heads-of-state, the UN and national liberation movements. Graham announced the starting of a course on television screenwriting in Accra to create a group of writers for Ghana National Television."}
{"text":"During her first visit to China in 1959, Shirley Graham Du Bois, alongside her husband W.E.B Du Bois, was commemorated in China for their activism and commitment to Black Liberation, as well as for liberation of all people of color across the globe. The Communist Party of China in 1959 commemorated W.E.B Du Bois by publishing his book The Soul of Black Folk in Chinese languages. Shirley Graham Du Bois devoted her time in China to the women\u2019s struggle and sought to bridge ties between the proletarian struggle in China with the struggle of Black Americans. The People\u2019s Daily recognized her as a member of the World Peace Council and of the national committee for the Association of American-Soviet Friendship."}
{"text":"Following the right-wing military coup led by Joseph Aruther Ankrah, ousting Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham Du Bois moved to Egypt and later moved to China again during the midst of the \u201cGreat Proletarian Cultural Revolution\u201d. During this time, Shirley Graham Du Bois sided with the Chinese Communists in the Sino-Soviet split. She had praised China\u2019s music programs in Shanghai and she joined the Bureau of Afro-Asian writers. Shirley Graham Du Bois spent a good amount of time in Chinese Communes and with the Red Guards."}
{"text":"She was able to attain a visa to the U.S to give talks at Yale and UCLA in 1970, where she was able to speak on Imperialism, Capitalism and colonialism and her experiences in countries undergoing Socialist construction, such as China and Vietnam. She also gave W.E.B Du Bois\u2019 writings to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst."}
{"text":"She produced a movie in China called \u201cWomen of the New China\u201d in 1974. Shirley Graham Du Bois passed away in Beijing, China in 1977, where she is buried in the Babaoshan Cemetery for Revolutionary Heroes. Her funeral was attended by many important political figures in China, including Cheng Yonggui, Deng Yingchao, and Hua Goufeng, where they honored her as a hero for her internationalism and selflessness. The Communist Party Chairman memorial wreaths in honor of Graham Du Bois, as did the embassies of Tanzania, Ghana, and Zambia."}
{"text":"In 1967, she was forced to leave after a military-led coup d'\u00e9tat, and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where she continued writing. Her surviving son David Graham Du Bois accompanied her and worked as a journalist."}
{"text":"Shirley Graham Du Bois died of breast cancer on March 27, 1977, aged 80, in Beijing, China. She died as a Tanzanian. She had moved from Ghana to Tanzania after Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, was overthrown on 24 February 1966, and became close to Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, and acquired Tanzanian citizenship."}
{"text":"Her alma mater Oberlin Conservatory of Music recently honored DuBois offering cluster courses and a conference devoted to reviving her remarkable legacy as a composer, activist and media figure. The conference was called \"Intersections: Recovering the Genius of Shirley Graham Du Bois 2020 Symposium\" on Thursday and Friday, February 27 & 28, 2020 that included a plenary lecture by Columbia professor and author Farah Jasmine Griffin. The event was co-sponsored by The Gertrude B. Lemle Teaching Center, StudiOC, a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dean of The College, Dean of the Conservatory, History Department, Oberlin College Libraries, Africana Studies Department, and the Theater Department."}
{"text":"After meeting Africans in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne in 1926, Graham composed the musical score and libretto of \"Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro\" (1932), an opera. She used music, dance and the book to express the story of Africans' journey to the North American colonies, through slavery and to freedom. It premiered in Cleveland, Ohio. The opera attracted 10,000 people to its premiere at the Cleveland Stadium and 15,000 to the second performance."}
{"text":"According to the \"Oxford Companion to African-American Literature,\" her theatre works included \"Deep Rivers\" (1939), a musical; \"It's Morning\" (1940), a one-act tragedy about a slave mother who contemplates infanticide; \"I Gotta Home\" (1940), a one-act drama; \"Track Thirteen\" (1940), a comedy for radio and her only published play; \"Elijah's Raven\" (1941), a three-act comedy; and \"Dust to Earth\" (1941), a three-act tragedy."}
{"text":"Graham used theater to tell the black woman's story and perspective, countering white versions of history. Despite her unsuccessful attempts to land a Broadway production as many African American women before and after her, her plays were still produced by Karamu Theatre in Cleveland and other major Black companies. Her work was also seen in many colleges and both \"Track Thirteen (1940)\" and \"Tom-Tom\" were aired on the radio."}
{"text":"Due to the difficulty in getting musicals or plays produced and published, Graham turned to literature. She wrote in a variety of genres, specializing from the 1950s in biographies of leading African-American and world figures for young readers. She wanted to increase the number of books that dealt with notable African Americans in elementary school libraries. Owing to her personal knowledge of her subjects, her books on Paul Robeson and Kwame Nkrumah are considered especially interesting. Other subjects included Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington; as well as Gamal Abdul Nasser, and Julius Nyerere. One of her last novels, \"Zulu Heart\" (1974), included sympathetic portrayals of whites in South Africa despite racial conflicts."}
{"text":"Selections from her correspondence with her husband (both before and after their relationship began) appear in the three volume 1976 collection edited by Herbert Aptheker (ed.), \"Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois\". Shirley Graham Du Bois is the subject of \"Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois\"."}
{"text":"Darius Gray is an African-American Latter-day Saint speaker and writer."}
{"text":"Gray was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in 1964. He attended Brigham Young University for one year and then transferred to the University of Utah. Gray worked for a time as a journalist."}
{"text":"Gray has traveled throughout the United States to make presentations. In 2007, he appeared in the PBS documentary \"The Mormons\". In February 2008, he made an invitation-only presentation at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit that was partly sponsored by New Detroit. He is also featured in the BYU Television series \"Questions and Ancestors\". Gray has also served as a developer of the website blacklds.org and on the advisory board of Reach the Children, a humanitarian organization designed to help people in Africa."}
{"text":"Gray was among those involved in Developing the \"Race and the Priesthood\" essay published on the website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in December 2013. In 2014 Gray was given a special citation by the Mormon History Association for contributions to Mormon history."}
{"text":"Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook; April 24, 1954) is a political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He became widely known while on death row for his writings and commentary on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death penalty sentence was overturned by a Federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year."}
{"text":"Beginning at the age of 14 in 1968, Abu-Jamal became involved with the Black Panther Party and was a member until October 1970. After he left the party, he completed his high school education, and later became a radio reporter. He eventually served as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He supported the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia and covered the 1978 confrontation in which one police officer was killed. The MOVE Nine were the members who were arrested and convicted of murder in that case."}
{"text":"Since 1982, the murder trial of Abu-Jamal has been seriously criticized for constitutional failings; some have claimed that he is innocent, and many opposed his death sentence. The Faulkner family, politicians, and other groups involved with law enforcement, state and city governments argue that Abu-Jamal's trial was fair, his guilt beyond question, and his death sentence justified."}
{"text":"When his death sentence was overturned by a Federal court in 2001, he was described as \"perhaps the world's best-known death-row inmate\" by \"The New York Times.\" During his imprisonment, Abu-Jamal has published books and commentaries on social and political issues; his first book was \"Live from Death Row\" (1995)."}
{"text":"He was born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. He has a younger brother named William. They attended local public schools."}
{"text":"In 1968, a high school teacher, a Kenyan instructing a class on African cultures, encouraged the students to take African or Arabic names for classroom use; he gave Cook the name \"Mumia\". According to Abu-Jamal, \"Mumia\" means \"Prince\" and was the name of a Kenyan anti-colonial African nationalist who fought against the British before Kenyan independence."}
{"text":"Abu-Jamal has described being \"kicked\u00a0... into the Black Panther Party\" as a teenager of 14, after suffering a beating from \"white racists\" and a policeman for trying to disrupt a 1968 rally for Independent candidate George Wallace, former governor of Alabama, who was running on a racist platform. From then he helped form the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party with Defense Captain Reggie Schell, and other Panthers. He was appointed as the chapter's \"Lieutenant of Information,\" responsible for writing information and news communications. In an interview in the early years, Abu-Jamal quoted Mao Zedong, saying that \"political power grows out of the barrel of a gun\". That same year, he dropped out of Benjamin Franklin High School and began living at the branch's headquarters."}
{"text":"He spent late 1969 in New York City and early 1970 in Oakland, living and working with BPP colleagues in those cities; the party had been founded in Oakland. He was a party member from May 1969 until October 1970. During this period, he was subject to illegal surveillance as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program, with which the Philadelphia police cooperated. The FBI was working to infiltrate black radical groups and to disrupt them by creating internal dissension."}
{"text":"After leaving the Panthers, Abu-Jamal returned as a student to his former high school. He was suspended for distributing literature calling for \"black revolutionary student power\". He led unsuccessful protests to change the school name to Malcolm X High, to honor the major African-American leader who had been killed in New York by political opponents."}
{"text":"After attaining his GED, Abu-Jamal studied briefly at Goddard College in rural Vermont. He returned to Philadelphia."}
{"text":"Cook adopted the surname Abu-Jamal (\"father of Jamal\" in Arabic) after the birth of his first child, son Jamal, on July 18, 1971. He married Jamal's mother Biba in 1973, but they did not stay together long. Their daughter, Lateefa, was born shortly after the wedding. The couple divorced."}
{"text":"In 1977 Abu-Jamal married again, to his second wife, Marilyn (known as \"Peachie\"). Their son, Mazi, was born in early 1978. By 1981, Abu-Jamal had divorced Peachie and had married his third (and current) wife, Wadiya."}
{"text":"By 1975 Abu-Jamal was working in radio newscasting, first at Temple University's WRTI and then at commercial enterprises. In 1975, he was employed at radio station WHAT, and he became host of a weekly feature program at WCAU-FM in 1978. He also worked for brief periods at radio station WPEN. He became active in the local chapter of the Marijuana Users Association of America."}
{"text":"From 1979 to 1981 he worked at National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news. As a radio journalist, Abu-Jamal was renowned for identifying with and covering the MOVE anarcho-primitivist commune in West Philadelphia's Powelton Village neighborhood. He reported on the 1979\u201380 trial of certain members (the \"MOVE Nine\"), who were convicted of the murder of police officer James Ramp. Abu-Jamal had several high-profile interviews, including with Julius Erving, Bob Marley and Alex Haley. He was elected president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists."}
{"text":"Before joining MOVE, Abu-Jamal reported on the organization. When he joined MOVE, he said it was because of his love of the people in the organization. Thinking back on it later, he said he \"was probably enraged as well\"."}
{"text":"In December 1981, Abu-Jamal was working as a taxicab driver in Philadelphia two nights a week to supplement his income. He had been working part-time as a reporter for WDAS, then an African-American-oriented and minority-owned radio station."}
{"text":"Traffic stop and death of officer Faulkner."}
{"text":"At 3:55\u00a0am on December 9, 1981, in Philadelphia, close to the intersection at 13th and Locust streets, Philadelphia Police Department officer Daniel Faulkner conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle belonging to and driven by William Cook, Abu-Jamal's younger brother. Faulkner and Cook became engaged in a physical confrontation. Driving his cab in the vicinity, Abu-Jamal observed the altercation, parked, and ran across the street toward Cook's car. Faulkner was shot in the back and face. He shot Abu-Jamal in the stomach. Faulkner died at the scene from the gunshot to his head."}
{"text":"Police arrived and arrested Abu-Jamal, who was found to be wearing a shoulder holster. His revolver, which had five spent cartridges, was beside him. He was taken directly from the scene of the shooting to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he received treatment for his wound. He was next taken to Police"}
{"text":"Headquarters, where he was charged and held for trial in the first-degree murder of Officer Faulkner."}
{"text":"The prosecution presented four witnesses to the court about the shootings. Robert Chobert, a cab driver who testified he was parked behind Faulkner, identified Abu-Jamal as the shooter. Cynthia White testified that Abu-Jamal emerged from a nearby parking lot and shot Faulkner. Michael Scanlan, a motorist, testified that from two car lengths away he saw a man matching Abu-Jamal's description run across the street from a parking lot and shoot Faulkner. Albert Magilton testified to seeing Faulkner pull over Cook's car. As Abu-Jamal started to cross the street toward them, Magilton turned away and did not see what happened next."}
{"text":"The prosecution presented two witnesses from the hospital where Abu-Jamal was treated. Hospital security guard Priscilla Durham and police officer Garry Bell testified that Abu-Jamal said in the hospital, \"I shot the motherfucker, and I hope the motherfucker dies.\""}
{"text":"A .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver, belonging to Abu-Jamal, with five spent cartridges, was retrieved beside him at the scene. He was wearing a shoulder holster. Anthony Paul, the Supervisor of the Philadelphia Police Department's firearms identification unit, testified at trial that the cartridge cases and rifling characteristics of the weapon were consistent with bullet fragments taken from Faulkner's body. Tests to confirm that Abu-Jamal had handled and fired the weapon were not performed. Contact with arresting police and other surfaces at the scene could have compromised the forensic value of such tests."}
{"text":"After three hours of deliberations, the jury presented a unanimous guilty verdict."}
{"text":"In the sentencing phase of the trial, Abu-Jamal read to the jury from a prepared statement. He was cross-examined about issues relevant to the assessment of his character by Joseph McGill, the prosecuting attorney."}
{"text":"In his statement, Abu-Jamal criticized his attorney as a \"legal trained lawyer\", who was imposed on him against his will and who \"knew he was inadequate to the task and chose to follow the directions of this black-robed conspirator [referring to the judge], Albert Sabo, even if it meant ignoring my directions.\" He claimed that his rights had been \"deceitfully stolen\" from him by [Judge] Sabo, particularly focusing on the denial of his request to receive defense assistance from John Africa, who was not an attorney, and being prevented from proceeding \"pro se\". He quoted remarks of John Africa, and said:"}
{"text":"Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death by the unanimous decision of the jury. Amnesty International has objected to the introduction by the prosecution at the time of his sentencing of statements from when he was an activist as a youth. It also protested the politicization of the trial, noting that there was documented recent history in Philadelphia of police abuse and corruption, including fabricated evidence and use of excessive force. Amnesty International concluded \"that the proceedings used to convict and sentence Mumia Abu-Jamal to death were in violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty\"."}
{"text":"The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on March 6, 1989, heard and rejected a direct appeal of his conviction. It subsequently denied rehearing. The Supreme Court of the United States denied his petition for writ of \"certiorari\" on October 1, 1990, and denied his petition for rehearing twice up to June 10, 1991."}
{"text":"On June 1, 1995, Abu-Jamal's death warrant was signed by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. Its execution was suspended while Abu-Jamal pursued state post-conviction review. At the post-conviction review hearings, new witnesses were called. William \"Dales\" Singletary testified that he saw the shooting, and that the gunman was the passenger in Cook's car. Singletary's account contained discrepancies which rendered it \"not credible\" in the opinion of the court."}
{"text":"The six judges of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled unanimously that all issues raised by Abu-Jamal, including the claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, were without merit. The Supreme Court of the United States denied a petition for \"certiorari\" against that decision on October 4, 1999, enabling Ridge to sign a second death warrant on October 13, 1999. Its execution was stayed as Abu-Jamal began to seek federal \"habeas corpus\" review."}
{"text":"In 1999, Arnold Beverly claimed that he and an unnamed assailant, not Mumia Abu-Jamal, shot Daniel Faulkner as part of a contract killing because Faulkner was interfering with graft and payoff to corrupt police. As Abu-Jamal's defense team prepared another appeal in 2001, they were divided over use of the Beverly affidavit. Some thought it usable and others rejected Beverly's story as \"not credible\"."}
{"text":"Private investigator George Newman claimed in 2001 that Chobert had recanted his testimony. Commentators noted that police and news photographs of the crime scene did not show Chobert's taxi, and that Cynthia White, the only witness at the original trial to testify to seeing the taxi, had previously provided crime scene descriptions that omitted it. Cynthia White was declared to be dead by the state of New Jersey in 1992, but Pamela Jenkins claimed that she saw White alive as late as 1997. The Free Mumia Coalition has claimed that White was a police informant and that she falsified her testimony against Abu-Jamal."}
{"text":"Kenneth Pate, who was imprisoned with Abu-Jamal on other charges, has since claimed that his step-sister Priscilla Durham, a hospital security guard, admitted later she had not heard the \"hospital confession\" to which she had testified at trial. The hospital doctors said that Abu-Jamal was \"on the verge of fainting\" when brought in, and they did not hear any such confession."}
{"text":"In 2008, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rejected a further request from Abu-Jamal for a hearing into claims that the trial witnesses perjured themselves, on the grounds that he had waited too long before filing the appeal."}
{"text":"On March 26, 2012 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rejected his appeal for retrial. His defense had asserted, based on a 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences, that forensic evidence presented by the prosecution and accepted into evidence in the original trial was unreliable. This was reported as Abu-Jamal's last legal appeal."}
{"text":"The Free Mumia Coalition published statements by William Cook and his brother Abu-Jamal in the spring of 2001. Cook, who had been stopped by the police officer, had not made any statement before April 29, 2001, and did not testify at his brother's trial. In 2001 he said that he had not seen who had shot Faulkner. Abu-Jamal did not make any public statements about Faulkner's murder until May 4, 2001. In his version of events, he claimed that he was sitting in his cab across the street when he heard shouting, saw a police vehicle, and heard the sound of gunshots. Upon seeing his brother appearing disoriented across the street, Abu-Jamal ran to him from the parking lot and was shot by a police officer."}
{"text":"In 2001 Judge William H. Yohn, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania upheld the conviction, saying that Abu-Jamal did not have the right to a new trial. But he vacated the sentence of death on December 18, 2001, citing irregularities in the penalty phase of the trial and the original process of sentencing. Particularly, he said that"}
{"text":"He ordered the State of Pennsylvania to commence new sentencing proceedings within 180 days, and ruled unconstitutional the requirement that a jury be unanimous in its finding of circumstances mitigating against a sentence of death."}
{"text":"Eliot Grossman and Marlene Kamish, attorneys for Abu-Jamal, criticized the ruling on the grounds that it denied the possibility of a \"trial de novo\", at which they could introduce evidence that their client had been framed. Prosecutors also criticized the ruling. Officer Faulkner's widow Maureen said the judgment would allow Abu-Jamal, whom she described as a \"remorseless, hate-filled killer\", to \"be permitted to enjoy the pleasures that come from simply being alive\". Both parties appealed."}
{"text":"On December 6, 2005, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals admitted four issues for appeal of the ruling of the District Court:"}
{"text":"The Third Circuit Court heard oral arguments in the appeals on May 17, 2007, at the United States Courthouse in Philadelphia. The appeal panel consisted of Chief Judge Anthony Joseph Scirica, Judge Thomas Ambro, and Judge Robert Cowen. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sought to reinstate the sentence of death, on the basis that Yohn's ruling was flawed, as he should have deferred to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which had already ruled on the issue of sentencing. The prosecution said that the \"Batson\" claim was invalid because Abu-Jamal made no complaints during the original jury selection."}
{"text":"The resulting jury was racially mixed, with 2 blacks and 10 whites at the time of the unanimous conviction, but defense counsel told the Third Circuit Court that Abu-Jamal did not get a fair trial because the jury was racially biased, misinformed, and the judge was a racist. He noted that the prosecution used eleven out of fourteen peremptory challenges to eliminate prospective black jurors. Terri Maurer-Carter, a former Philadelphia court stenographer, stated in a 2001 affidavit that she overheard Judge Sabo say \"Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the nigger\" in the course of a conversation with three people present regarding Abu-Jamal's case. Sabo denied having made any such comment."}
{"text":"On March 27, 2008, the three-judge panel issued a majority 2\u20131 opinion upholding Yohn's 2001 opinion but rejecting the bias and \"Batson\" claims, with Judge Ambro dissenting on the \"Batson\" issue. On July 22, 2008, Abu-Jamal's formal petition seeking reconsideration of the decision by the full Third Circuit panel of 12 judges was denied. On April 6, 2009, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Abu-Jamal's appeal, allowing his conviction to stand."}
{"text":"On January 19, 2010, the Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to reconsider its decision to rescind the death penalty. The same three-judge panel convened in Philadelphia on November 9, 2010, to hear oral argument. On April 26, 2011, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed its prior decision to vacate the death sentence on the grounds that the jury instructions and verdict form were ambiguous and confusing. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October."}
{"text":"On December 7, 2011, District Attorney of Philadelphia R. Seth Williams announced that prosecutors, with the support of the victim's family, would no longer seek the death penalty for Abu-Jamal and would accept a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. This sentence was reaffirmed by the Superior Court of Pennsylvania on July 9, 2013."}
{"text":"After the press conference on the sentence, widow Maureen Faulkner said that she did not want to relive the trauma of another trial. She understood that it would be extremely difficult to present the case against Abu-Jamal again, after the passage of 30 years and the deaths of several key witnesses. She also reiterated her belief that Abu-Jamal will be punished further after death."}
{"text":"In 1991 Abu-Jamal published an essay in the \"Yale Law Journal\", on the death penalty and his death row experience. In May 1994, Abu-Jamal was engaged by National Public Radio's \"All Things Considered\" program to deliver a series of monthly three-minute commentaries on crime and punishment. The broadcast plans and commercial arrangement were canceled following condemnations from, among others, the Fraternal Order of Police and U.S. Senator Bob Dole (Kansas Republican Party). Abu-Jamal sued NPR for not airing his work, but a federal judge dismissed the suit. His commentaries later were published in May 1995 as part of his first book, \"Live from Death Row.\" At April 2021 he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was scheduled for heart surgery to relieve blocked coronary arteries"}
{"text":"In 1996, he completed a B.A. degree via correspondence classes at Goddard College, which he had attended for a time as a young man. He has been invited as commencement speaker by a number of colleges, and has participated via recordings. In 1999, Abu-Jamal was invited to record a keynote address for the graduating class at Evergreen State College in Washington State. The event was protested by some. In 2000, he recorded a commencement address for Antioch College. The now defunct New College of California School of Law presented him with an honorary degree \"for his struggle to resist the death penalty.\""}
{"text":"On October 5, 2014, he gave the commencement speech at Goddard College, via playback of a recording. As before, the choice of Abu-Jamal was controversial. Ten days later the Pennsylvania legislature had passed an addition to the Crime Victims Act called \"Revictimization Relief.\" The new provision is intended to prevent actions that cause \"a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish\" to those who have previously been victimized by crime. It was signed by Republican governor Tom Corbett five days later. Commentators suggest that the bill was directed to control Abu-Jamal's journalism, book publication, and public speaking, and that it would be challenged on the grounds of free speech."}
{"text":"With occasional interruptions due to prison disciplinary actions, Abu-Jamal has for many years been a regular commentator on an online broadcast, sponsored by Prison Radio. He also is published as a regular columnist for \"Junge Welt,\" a Marxist newspaper in Germany. For almost a decade, Abu-Jamal taught introductory courses in Georgist economics by correspondence to other prisoners around the world."}
{"text":"In addition, he has written and published several books: \"Live From Death Row\" (1995), a diary of life on Pennsylvania's death row; \"All Things Censored\" (2000), a collection of essays examining issues of crime and punishment; \"Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience\" (2003), in which he explores religious themes; and \"We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party\" (2004), a history of the Black Panthers that draws on his own experience and research, and discusses the federal government's program known as COINTELPRO, to disrupt black activist organizations."}
{"text":"In 1995, Abu-Jamal was punished with solitary confinement for engaging in entrepreneurship contrary to prison regulations. Subsequent to the airing of the 1996 HBO documentary \",\" which included footage from visitation interviews conducted with him, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections banned outsiders from using any recording equipment in state prisons."}
{"text":"In litigation before the U.S. Court of Appeals, in 1998 Abu-Jamal successfully established his right while in prison to write for financial gain. The same litigation also established that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections had illegally opened his mail in an attempt to establish whether he was earning money by his writing."}
{"text":"When, for a brief time in August 1999, Abu-Jamal began delivering his radio commentaries live on the Pacifica Network's \"Democracy Now!\" weekday radio newsmagazine, prison staff severed the connecting wires of his telephone from their mounting in mid-performance. He was later allowed to resume his broadcasts, and hundreds of his broadcasts have been aired on Pacifica Radio."}
{"text":"Following the overturning of his death sentence, Abu-Jamal was sentenced to life in prison in December 2011. At the end of January 2012, he was shifted from the isolation of death row into the general prison population at State Correctional Institution\u00a0\u2013 Mahanoy."}
{"text":"On March 30, 2015, he suffered diabetic shock and has been diagnosed with active Hepatitis C. In August 2015 his attorneys filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, alleging that he has not received appropriate medical care for his serious health conditions."}
{"text":"Labor unions, politicians, advocates, educators, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and human rights advocacy organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed concern about the impartiality of the trial of Abu-Jamal. Amnesty International neither takes a position on the guilt or innocence of Abu-Jamal nor classifies him as a political prisoner."}
{"text":"The family of Daniel Faulkner, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, politicians, and the Fraternal Order of Police have continued to support the original trial and sentencing of the journalist. In August 1999, the Fraternal Order of Police called for an economic boycott against all individuals and organizations that support Abu-Jamal. Many such groups operate within the Prison-Industrial Complex, a system which Abu-Jamal has frequently criticized."}
{"text":"Partly based on his own writing, Abu-Jamal and his cause have become widely known internationally, and other groups have classified him as a political prisoner. About 25 cities, including Montreal, Palermo, and Paris, have made him an honorary citizen."}
{"text":"In 2001, he received the sixth biennial Erich M\u00fchsam Prize, named after an anarcho-communist essayist, which recognizes activism in line with that of its namesake. In October 2002, he was made an honorary member of the German political organization Society of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime\u00a0\u2013 Federation of Anti-Fascists (VVN-BdA)."}
{"text":"In 2007, the widow of Officer Faulkner co-authored a book with Philadelphia radio journalist Michael Smerconish titled \"Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Pain, Loss, and Injustice.\" The book was part memoir of Faulkner's widow, and part discussion in which they chronicled Abu-Jamal's trial and discussed evidence for his conviction. They also discussed support for the death penalty."}
{"text":"In early 2014, President Barack Obama nominated Debo Adegbile, a former lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. He had worked on Abu-Jamal's case, and his nomination was rejected by the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan basis because of that."}
{"text":"On April 10, 2015, Marylin Zuniga, a teacher at Forest Street Elementary School in Orange, New Jersey, was suspended without pay after asking her students to write cards to Abu-Jamal, who was ill in prison due to complications from diabetes, without approval from the school or parents. Some parents and police leaders denounced her actions. On the other hand, community members, parents, teachers, and professors expressed their support and condemned Zuniga's suspension. Scholars and educators nationwide, including Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and Cornel West among others, signed a letter calling for her immediate reinstatement. On May 13, 2015, the Orange Preparatory Academy board voted to dismiss Marylin Zuniga after hearing from her and several of her supporters."}
{"text":"Dorothy Lavinia Brown (January 7, 1914 \u2013 June 13, 2004), also known as \"Dr. D.\", was an African-American surgeon, legislator, and teacher. She was the first female surgeon of African-American ancestry from the Southeastern United States. She was also the first African American female to serve in the Tennessee General Assembly as she was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives. While serving in the House of Representatives, Brown fought for women's rights and for the rights of people of color."}
{"text":"Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was surrendered to the Troy Orphan Asylum, an orphanage in Troy, New York at five months old by her mother, Edna Brown. Dorothy lived at the orphanage until the age of 12. There were multiple factors that inspired Brown to pursue a career in surgery: the care she received during her tonsillectomy, and a performance that she watched that made her want to do something to make other African Americans proud."}
{"text":"Although her mother tried to persuade Dorothy to live with her again, Brown ran away five times, returning to the Troy orphanage each time. At the age of fifteen, Brown ran away to enroll at Troy High School. The principal at Troy High School found out that Brown was homeless, and he arranged for her to be taken in by Lola and Samuel Wesley Redmon. She worked as a mother's helper in the house of Mrs. W. F. Jarrett, in Albany, New York, which was just across the Hudson River. When she was fifteen, she worked at a self-service laundry."}
{"text":"After finishing high school, Brown attended Bennett College, a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received a scholarship from the Women\u2019s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church. Brown earned money during this period as a domestic helper. She was aided by a Methodist woman, of the Division of Christian Service, to be admitted into the American College of Surgeons, where she earned a BA degree in 1941."}
{"text":"She began working as an inspector at the Rochester Army Ordnance Department in Rochester, New York. In 1944, Brown was admitted to study medicine at Meharry Medical College, a historically black college in Nashville. She completed her internship at the Harlem Hospital in New York City. After graduating in 1948 in the top third of her class, Brown became a resident at Hubbard Hospital of Meharry in 1949, despite local opposition to training female surgeons. She had gained approval from the chief surgeon, Matthew Walker, Sr., M.D. Brown completed her residency in 1954."}
{"text":"After her work in WWII, she entered medical school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville Tennessee. Dr. Brown then did a one-year internship at Harlem Hospital and next she completed a five-year residency in general surgery at Meharry and Hubbard Hospital. In 1959, She became the first black female surgeon to become a fellow of the American College of Surgeons."}
{"text":"In 1968, Brown tried to obtain a seat in the Tennessee Senate, but lost in part due to her support for abortion laws. In 1968, following her departure from politics, Brown returned to becoming a full-time physician at the Riverside Hospital. Brown also acted as an attending surgeon at the George W. Hubbard and General Hospitals, as director of education for the clinical rotation program of the Riverside and Meharry Hospitals. She was also a surgery professor at the Meharry Medical College and consulted for the National Institutes of Health in the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute."}
{"text":"After losing in her run for a seat in the Tennessee Senate, Brown served on the Joint Committee on Opportunities for Women in Medicine, sponsored by the American Medical Association. Along with support women in medicine, Brown also had a major influence in the fight for the rights of people of color, and was a life long member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)."}
{"text":"In 1956, Brown agreed to adopt a female child from an unmarried patient at the Riverside Hospital. The patient came to Brown while still pregnant and asked her to adopt her child. Brown agreed because she wanted a child and knew that a chance like this would most likely never come again. Brown became the first known single female in Tennessee to legally adopt a child, whom she named Lola Denise Brown in honor of her foster mother. She later adopted a son named Kevin. Brown was a member of the United Methodist Church."}
{"text":"Brown wrote an autobiography, essays, and inspirational guides."}
{"text":"In 1959, she became the third woman to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the first African-American woman to be elected. In 1971, the Dorothy L. Brown Women's Residence at Meharry Medical College, Nashville, was named after her. She also received honorary doctorate degrees from the Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, and also from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. In particular, she received her honorary degrees in the Humanities from Bennett College and Cumberland University."}
{"text":"Brown was a member of the board of trustees at Bennett College and of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She participated as a speaker on panels that discussed scientific, religious, medical, and political issues. Brown was also awarded the Horatio Alger Award in 1994 and the Carnegie Foundation's humanitarian award in 1993."}
{"text":"Because Dorothy Lavinia Brown had accomplished so much in her career as a surgeon, she was a very sought-after public speaker, both nationally and internationally."}
{"text":"She died in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2004 of congestive heart failure."}
{"text":"LaSharah Bunting is an editor and journalist who worked at \"The New York Times\" for 14 years and was the senior editor of digital transformation and recruitment when she left as part of a restructuring plan in July 2017. It's been noted Bunting was one of the highest ranking African Americans in the newsroom at her departure\",\" and was one of seven high-profile women of color who left the \"Times\" in 2017, leaving few people of color at the management level. Bunting joined the Knight Foundation in August 2017."}
{"text":"Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (August 10, 1858February 27, 1964) was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history."}
{"text":"Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. In 1924, she received her PhD in history from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority."}
{"text":"Cooper made contributions to social science fields, particularly in sociology. Her first book, \"A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South\", is widely acknowledged as one of the first articulations of Black feminism, giving Cooper the often-used title of \"the Mother of Black Feminism\"."}
{"text":"Anna \"Annie\" Julia Haywood was born enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1858. She and her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, were held in bondage by George Washington Haywood (1802\u20131890), one of the sons of North Carolina's longest serving state treasurer John Haywood, who helped found the University of North Carolina, but whose estate later was forced to repay missing funds. Either George, in whose household her mother worked in bondage, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, in whose household her older brother Andrew was enslaved, were probably Anna's father; Anna's mother refused to clarify paternity. George became state attorney for Wake County, North Carolina and with a brother owned a plantation in Greene County, Alabama."}
{"text":"Cooper worked as a domestic servant in the Haywood home and had two older brothers, Andrew J. Haywood and Rufus Haywood. Andrew, enslaved by Fabius J. Haywood, later served in the Spanish\u2013American War. Rufus was also born enslaved and became the leader of the musical group \"Stanley's Band\"."}
{"text":"Cooper's academic excellence enabled her to work as a tutor for younger children, which also helped her pay for her educational expenses. After completing her studies, she remained at the institution as an instructor. In the 1883\u20131884 school year, she taught classics, modern history, higher English, and vocal and instrumental music; she is not listed as faculty in the 1884\u20131885 year, but in the 1885\u20131886 year she is listed as \"Instructor in Classic, Rhetoric, Etc.\" Her husband's early death may have contributed to her ability to continue teaching; if she had stayed married, she might have been encouraged or required to withdraw from the university to become a housewife."}
{"text":"In 1900 she made her first trip to Europe, to participate in the First Pan-African Conference in London. After visiting the cathedral towns of Scotland and England, she went to Paris for the World Exposition. \"After a week at the Exposition she went to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play, thence to Munich and other German towns, and then to Italy through Rome, Naples, Venice, Pompeii, Mt. Vesuvius, and Florence.\""}
{"text":"She later moved to Washington, DC. In 1892, Anna Cooper, Helen Appo Cook, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Forten Grimk\u00e9, Mary Jane Peterson, Mary Church Terrell, and Evelyn Shaw formed the Colored Women's League in Washington, D.C. The goals of the service-oriented club were to promote unity, social progress and the best interests of the African-American community. Helen Cook was elected president."}
{"text":"Cooper would develop a close friendship with Charlotte Forten Grimk\u00e9 \u2013 Cooper began teaching Latin at M Street High School, becoming principal in 1901. She later became entangled in a controversy involving the differing attitudes about black education, as she advocated for a model of classical education espoused by W.E.B. Du Bois, \"designed to prepare eligible students for higher education and leadership\", rather than the vocational program that was promoted by Booker T. Washington. As a result of this, she left the school. Later, she was recalled to M Street, and she fit her work on her doctoral thesis into \"nooks and crannies of free time\"."}
{"text":"\"A Voice from the South\" received significant praise from leaders in the Black community."}
{"text":"Cooper was an author, educator, and public speaker. In 1893, she delivered a paper titled \"The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation\" at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. She was one of five African-American women invited to speak at this event, along with: Fannie Barrier Williams, Sarah Jane Woodson Early, Hallie Quinn Brown, and Fanny Jackson Coppin."}
{"text":"Cooper was also present at the first Pan-African Conference in London, England, in 1900 and delivered a paper titled \"The Negro Problem in America.\""}
{"text":"Cooper's later years were much involved with Frelinghuysen University, of which she was the president. This was an institution providing continuing education to working African Americans at hours that did not interfere with their employment. After the University found servicing its mortgage prohibitive, she moved it to her own house."}
{"text":"On February 27, 1964, Cooper died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 105. Her memorial was held in a chapel on the campus of Saint Augustine's College, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her academic career began. She was buried alongside her husband at the City Cemetery in Raleigh."}
{"text":"Although the alumni magazine of Cooper's undergraduate alma mater, Oberlin College, praised her in 1924, stating, \"The class of '84 is honored in the achievement of this scholarly and colored alumna,\" when she tried to present her edition of \"Le P\u00e8lerinage de Charlemagne\" to the college the next year, it was rejected."}
{"text":"Cooper's other writings include her autobiographical booklet \"The Third Step\", about earning her doctorate from the Sorbonne, and a memoir about the Grimk\u00e9 Family, titled \"The Early Years in Washington: Reminiscences of Life with the Grimk\u00e9s,\" which appeared in \"Personal Recollections of the Grimk\u00e9 family and the Life and Writings of Charlotte Forten Grimk\u00e9\" (privately published in 1951)."}
{"text":"Pages 24 and 25 of the 2016 United States passport contain the following quotation:"}
{"text":"\"The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class \u2013 it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.\" \u2013 Anna Julia Cooper"}
{"text":"In 2009, the United States Postal Service released a commemorative stamp in Cooper's honor."}
{"text":"Also in 2009, a tuition-free private middle school was opened and named in her honor - the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School on historic Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia."}
{"text":"Cooper is honored with a Lesser Feast (with Elizabeth Evelyn Wright) on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on February 28."}
{"text":"The Anna Julia Cooper Center on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South at Wake Forest University was established in Anna Cooper's honor. Melissa Harris-Perry is the founding director."}
{"text":"There is an Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women\u2019s Studies at Spelman College."}
{"text":"Marita Golden (born April 28, 1950) is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston\/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers."}
{"text":"Marita Golden was born in Washington, D.C., in 1950 and attended the city\u2019s public schools. She received a B.A. degree in American Studies and English from American University and a M.SC. in Journalism from Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, she worked in publishing and began a career as a freelance writer, writing feature articles for many magazines and newspapers including \"Essence Magazine\", \"The New York Times\", and \"The Washington Post\"."}
{"text":"Golden's first book, \"Migrations of the Heart\" (1983), was a memoir based on her experiences coming of age during the 1960s and her political activism as well as her marriage to a Nigerian and her life in Nigeria, where she lived for four years."}
{"text":"She has taught at many colleges and universities, including the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria, Roxbury Community College, Emerson College, American University, George Mason University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds the position of Writer in Residence at the University of the District of Columbia, in Washington, D.C. She has held previous Writer-in-Residence positions at Brandeis University, University of the District of Columbia, Hampton University, Simmons College, Columbia College, William and Mary, Old Dominion University and Howard University."}
{"text":"As a literary activist, she co-founded the Washington, D.C.-based African-American Writers Guild, as well as the Hurston\/Wright Foundation, named in honor of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, which serves the national and international community of Black writers and administers the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award."}
{"text":"Gabrielle Christina Victoria Douglas (born December 31, 1995) is an American artistic gymnast. She is the 2012 Olympic all around champion and the 2015 World all-around silver medalist. She was a member of the gold-winning teams at both the 2012 and the 2016 Summer Olympics, dubbed the \"Fierce Five\" and the \"Final Five\" by the media, respectively. She was also a member of the gold-winning American teams at the 2011 and the 2015 World Championships."}
{"text":"Douglas is the first African American to become the Olympic individual all-around champion, and the first U.S. gymnast to win gold in both the individual all-around and team competitions at the same Olympics. She was also the 2016 AT&T American Cup all-around champion."}
{"text":"As a public figure, Douglas' gymnastics successes have led to her life story adaptation in the 2014 Lifetime biopic film, \"The Gabby Douglas Story\", as well as the acquisition of her own reality television series, \"Douglas Family Gold\". Douglas has also written a book about her life and what it takes to be an Olympic gold medalist by determination and perseverance."}
{"text":"Gabrielle Douglas was born in Newport News, Virginia and grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to parents Timothy Douglas and Natalie Hawkins-Douglas. She has three older siblings: two sisters, Arielle and Joyelle, and one brother, Johnathan. She began training in gymnastics at age six when her older sister convinced their mother to enroll her in gymnastics classes. In October 2002, Douglas began her training at Gymstrada."}
{"text":"At the age of eight, Douglas won the Level 4 all-around gymnastics title at the 2004 Virginia State Championships."}
{"text":"At 14, she moved to Des Moines, Iowa, to train full-time with coach Liang Chow. Because her family had to stay in Virginia while her siblings finished school, she lived with Travis and Missy Parton and their four daughters, one of whom also trained at Chow's gym. However, Douglas struggled to fit in because of the separation from her family and hometown."}
{"text":"Douglas is Christian; she said, \"I believe in God. He is the secret of my success. He gives people talent\", and \"... I love sharing about my faith. God has given me this amazing God-given talent, so I'm going to go out and glorify His name.\" Douglas has also stated in her biography that when she was younger her \"family practiced some of the Jewish traditions\", including attending a Conservative Jewish synagogue, keeping kosher, and celebrating Hanukah."}
{"text":"Douglas made her international debut in 2008 at the US Classic in Houston, Texas, where she placed 10th place in the all-around rankings. She went on to compete at the 2008 Visa Championships in Boston, Massachusetts. Placing 16th in that competition, Douglas was not eligible for the 2008 Junior Women's National Team."}
{"text":"In 2009, Douglas suffered a fracture in the growth plate of her wrist. Due to this injury, she was not able to compete and missed the 2009 Covergirl US Classic. While she competed at the 2009 Visa Championships in Dallas, Texas, Douglas was unable to perform her full routines and competed only on balance beam and floor exercise."}
{"text":"Douglas competed at the 2010 Nastia Liukin Supergirl Cup, a televised Level 10 meet held in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she placed fourth all-around."}
{"text":"Her first elite meet was the 2010 CoverGirl Classic in Chicago, Illinois, where Douglas placed third on balance beam, 6th on vault, and 9th all-around in the junior division."}
{"text":"At the 2010 U.S. Junior National Championships, Douglas won the silver medal on balance beam, placed fourth all-around and on vault, and tied for eighth on floor exercise."}
{"text":"At the 2010 Pan American Championships in Guadalajara, Mexico, Douglas won the uneven bars title, and she won a share of the U.S. team gold medal. She also placed fifth all-around."}
{"text":"At the City of Jesolo Trophy in Italy, Douglas was part of the US team that won gold. She also placed second on floor, tied for third on beam, and placed fourth in the all-around and on vault."}
{"text":"Douglas earned the silver medal in uneven bars at the CoverGirl Classic in Chicago."}
{"text":"At the 2011 U.S. National Championships in St. Paul, Minnesota, Douglas tied for third on bars and placed seventh all-around."}
{"text":"At the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo, Japan, Douglas shared in the team gold medal won by the U.S. Douglas also placed fifth in uneven bars."}
{"text":"At the AT&T American Cup at Madison Square Garden in March, Douglas received the highest total all-around score in the women's competition, ahead of her teammate and current world champion Jordyn Wieber. However, her scores did not count towards winning the competition because she was an alternate."}
{"text":"Later in March, she was part of the gold-winning U.S. team at the Pacific Rim Championships, where she also won gold in uneven bars."}
{"text":"At the 2012 U.S. National Championships in June, Douglas won the gold medal in uneven bars, silver in the all-around, and bronze in floor. M\u00e1rta K\u00e1rolyi, the National Team Coordinator for USA Gymnastics, nicknamed Douglas the \"Flying Squirrel\" for her aerial performance on the uneven bars."}
{"text":"At the 2012 Olympic Trials held in San Jose, California on July 1, Douglas placed first in the all-around rankings, securing the only guaranteed spot on the women's Olympic gymnastic team."}
{"text":"Douglas finished eighth in uneven bars, and seventh in balance beam. She is the first all-around champion to fail to medal in an individual event since women's gymnastics was added to the Olympics in 1952."}
{"text":"In August 2013, Douglas left Missy Parton's home, and moved to Los Angeles to be with her family. Although she was no longer training with Chow, she said that she was still preparing to compete in the 2016 Olympics."}
{"text":"In mid-April 2014, Douglas returned to Iowa to train once more with Coach Chow, in an attempt to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in Rio. Chow and his wife were delighted to have Douglas return to the Iowa gym, which they had not expected she would after her departure to Los Angeles in summer 2013. At that time they were also training promising junior Norah Flatley, who many considered similar to both Douglas and Shawn Johnson in performance style."}
{"text":"After participating in several national team camps in 2014, on November 25, 2014, Douglas was added back to the U.S. national team, along with Olympic teammate Aly Raisman and former Chow's Gymnastics teammate Rachel Gowey."}
{"text":"In March 2015, Douglas returned to international competition at the 2015 City of Jesolo Trophy in Jesolo, Italy. Douglas helped the USA win gold in the team competition and also placed 4th all-around behind defending World Champion Simone Biles, newcomer Bailie Key, and Olympic teammate Aly Raisman."}
{"text":"In July, Douglas competed at the U.S. Classic and finished second in the all-around behind 2-time World All-Around Champion Simone Biles and ahead of Maggie Nichols with a score of 60.500. She had a consistent night hitting clean routines. She placed second on uneven bars behind Madison Kocian and ahead of Bailie Key with a score of 15.400, third on balance beam behind Biles and Olympic teammate Aly Raisman with a score of 14.900, and second on floor exercise behind Biles and ahead of Key and Nichols with a score of 15.000."}
{"text":"On August 13 & 15, Douglas competed at the P&G Championships Indianapolis, Indiana, where she placed 5th overall with a score of 117.950, placing behind Simone Biles, Maggie Nichols, Aly Raisman, and Bailie Key."}
{"text":"Douglas started Night 1 on vault and despite a hop backwards on her double-twisting Yurchenko vault, she scored a 15.150. On bars, she had a high-flying piked Tkachev connected to her Pak Salto and had an excellent landing on her double layout dismount. She scored a 15.300 on bars. On beam, she had a shaky routine with balance checks but did score a 14.450. On floor, she had bad wobbles on her double Y-turn and her double turn with leg at horizontal (then didn't connect to her single turn with leg at horizontal). She had low landings and almost fell on her tucked full-in and scored a 13.850 to end Night 1 in 3rd with a total all-around score of 58.700."}
{"text":"Douglas was named to the Senior National Team for the first time since 2012 and received an invite to the 2015 Worlds Selection Camp in September. On October 8, 2015, it was announced that Douglas had been selected as a member of the 2015 US Women's World Championship team."}
{"text":"At the 2015 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, Douglas shared in the team gold medal won by the U.S. She also qualified for the individual all-around in 3rd place, and to the uneven bars final in 6th place. Douglas won the silver in the all-around, becoming the first reigning Olympic all-around champion since 2001 to return to the sport and win a world championships medal."}
{"text":"On November 13, 2015, \"The Columbus Dispatch\" revealed that Douglas would participate in the 2016 AT&T American Cup, in Newark, New Jersey. It was confirmed on December 17, 2015."}
{"text":"In March 2016, following her win at the 2016 AT&T American Cup, Douglas participated at the 2016 City of Jesolo Trophy, where she won the all-around title."}
{"text":"Douglas competed at the 2016 Secret US Classic in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 4. She did not compete in the all-around competition, which was won by Fierce Five teammate Aly Raisman. Douglas competed on UB and BB, scoring a 15.650 on UB to finish in 3rd behind Ashton Locklear and Madison Kocian on that event. On the balance beam, she scored a 14.550. This meant her all-around total was 30.200."}
{"text":"On June 24 and 26, Douglas competed at the P&G Championships in St. Louis, Missouri. On Night 1, she scored a 14.800 on vault, a 15.100 on uneven bars, a 14.200 on balance beam, and a 14.800 on floor exercise. On Night 2, she scored a 14.900 on vault, a 14.500 on uneven bars, a 15.050 on balance beam, and a 14.450 on floor exercise. Her grand total was 117.800 for both nights, putting her in fourth all-around."}
{"text":"On July 10, Douglas was named to the team for the 2016 Olympics, alongside Simone Biles, Laurie Hernandez, Madison Kocian, and Aly Raisman. She and Raisman became part of a select group of American gymnasts including Miller and Dawes to compete in two Olympics."}
{"text":"On July 11, Mattel, Inc. released a \"Gymnast Barbie\" doll modeled after Douglas."}
{"text":"On August 7, Douglas competed in the Women's Qualification at the 2016 Summer Olympics at the HSBC Arena (Arena Olimpica de Rio) in Rio de Janeiro. She scored a 15.166 on the vault, a 15.766 on the uneven bars, a 14.833 on the balance beam, and a 14.366 on the floor exercise. Along with the team final, she individually qualified into the uneven bars final. Douglas narrowly missed advancing to the all-around final to defend her title despite tallying the third-highest score in the preliminaries, since she was outscored by teammates Biles and Raisman and rules only allow two competitors from one NOC, similar to Wieber four years ago in London. Douglas also changed coaches during the competition, but kept her assistant coach."}
{"text":"Douglas helped the United States win a second consecutive gold medal in the team event, which was also her third Olympic gold medal. When the team final scores were announced, Douglas and her teammates called themselves the \"Final Five\" in honor of coach Marta Karolyi's retirement and the team size being reduced to four beginning in 2020."}
{"text":"Douglas finished seventh in the uneven bars event final."}
{"text":"In December 2012, the Associated Press named Douglas the Female Athlete of the Year. She became the fourth gymnast to receive the honor."}
{"text":"Douglas was a nominee for the Laureus World Sports Award for Breakthrough of the Year. In June 2013, Douglas received two BET Awards for her accomplishments."}
{"text":"In July 2012, Douglas and her teammates were featured on the cover of \"Sports Illustrated\" \"Olympic Preview\" issue, the first time an entire Olympic gymnastics team had been featured on the cover of the magazine. On July 20, Douglas was on one of five \"Time\" magazine Olympic covers."}
{"text":"On August 3, the Kellogg Company announced that it would put a picture of Douglas standing on the podium with her gold medal on special-edition boxes of corn flakes, breaking the tradition of Olympic athletes appearing on Wheaties boxes."}
{"text":"On August 23, Douglas threw the ceremonial pitch at Citi Field when the Colorado Rockies played the New York Mets."}
{"text":"On August 26, Douglas spoke about racist bullying at Excalibur Gymnastics in an interview with Oprah Winfrey and how it nearly made her quit the sport. She described an incident in which she had heard other girls at the gym say, \"Why doesn't Gabby do it? She's our slave,\" when chalk was needed to be scraped off the bars. The CEO of Excalibur Gymnastics, Gustavo Maure, denied these claims."}
{"text":"In September 2012, Nintendo announced that Douglas would be part of a new ad campaign for \"New Super Mario Bros. 2\". On September 4, Douglas led the Pledge of Allegiance at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina."}
{"text":"In December 2012, Douglas released her autobiography, \"Grace, Gold, and Glory: My Leap of Faith\". The book debuted at number four on \"The New York Times\" Young Adult Bestseller List. That same month, she performed a miniature floor routine at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards as part of the live performance by Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj of the \"Girl on Fire\" Inferno Remix \u2013 following Douglas' success in London, Minaj had opted to end her verse with a reference to her: \"I ain't tryna be that \/ Haters wanna see that \/ But I got 'em aggy \/ 'Cause I win the gold like Gabby.\""}
{"text":"Douglas had a small acting role on the Disney XD series \"Kickin It\" in the episode \"Gabby's Gold\", which aired on August 12, 2013."}
{"text":"\"The Gabby Douglas Story\" aired on Lifetime on February 1, 2014, starring Imani Hakim. Douglas performed all the gymnastic stunts herself. In 2015, it was announced that a reality television show for the Oxygen channel had been commissioned to follow Douglas and her family's life, issued under the working title \"Douglas Family Gold\". The show premiered on May 25, 2016. On August 23, 2016, it was announced that Douglas would be one of the judges at the 2017 Miss America pageant."}
{"text":"In 2017, she went public about having been sexually abused as a teenager by Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics."}
{"text":"Douglas appeared as the boss in an episode of \"Undercover Boss\" that first aired on May 11, 2018."}
{"text":"Gymnastic equipment used by Douglas at the 2012 Summer Olympics is at the National Museum of African American History and Culture."}
{"text":"In 2020, Douglas competed on \"The Masked Singer\" spin-off \"The Masked Dancer\" as \"Cotton Candy\" and was declared the winner of the season."}
{"text":"Douglas is most well known for her high-flying release skills on the uneven bars (hence her nickname \"The Flying Squirrel\"), her resilient demeanor, and her upbeat floor exercise routines. The following routines are those that were performed by Douglas at either an Olympic or a World Championships competition."}
{"text":"Carl Anthony (born February 8, 1939) is an American architect, regional planner, social justice activist, and author. He is the founder and co-director of Breakthrough Communities, a project dedicated to building multiracial leadership for sustainable communities in California and the rest of the nation. He is the former President of the Earth Island Institute, and is the co-founder and former executive director of its urban habitat program, one of the first environmental justice organizations to address race and class issues."}
{"text":"Carl Anthony was born in a predominantly African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA known as Black Bottom. His parents, Lewis Anthony (born William Edwards) and Mildred Anthony (n\u00e9e Cokine), sent Carl and his older brother Lewie to B.B. Comegys, an integrated elementary school in which only about a dozen of the 300 students were African American, rather than the segregated school called Woodrow Wilson, which was only a block away from their home. They later went on to attend Dobbins Vocational School, where Anthony was enrolled in the carpentry and cabinet-making shop. His teachers were impressed by his drawings and suggested that he transfer to the architectural drafting homeroom, where he fostered his interest in architecture."}
{"text":"Anthony graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 1969. Upon his graduation, he was awarded the William Kinne Fellowship, a grant to enrich students\u2019 education through travel. Anthony visited traditional towns and villages in West Africa, studying the ways in which people utilized their few resources to shape their environments."}
{"text":"Early Career: Architect\u2019s Renewal Committee and UC Berkeley."}
{"text":"Anthony began his professional career in the late 1960s at the Architect's Renewal Committee in Harlem, one of the first community design centers in the United States. Upon his return to the United States from West Africa in 1971, he relocated to California and taught at the University of California, Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design, later becoming a faculty member of the university's College of Natural Resources. In 1980 he left UC-Berkeley to work as an architect and urban planner."}
{"text":"In 2000, Anthony joined the Ford Foundation. There, he served as Acting Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit. He was also Director of the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative for seven years, and funded the Conversation of Regional Equity, a dialogue between policy analysts and advocates concerning racial justice and sustainability."}
{"text":"In 2008, Anthony co-founded Breakthrough Communities, a project of Earth House Center, an advocacy nonprofit for regional equity and environmental and climate justice and is serving as the co-director. Anthony founded Six Wins, an initiative in the Bay Area addressing the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions."}
{"text":"\"The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race\" (2017)."}
{"text":"Anthony's memoir, \"The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race\", addresses regional equity and climate change."}
{"text":"David Aldridge (born February 10, 1965) is an American sports journalist who works as a writer for \"The Athletic\". He was previously a reporter for Turner Sports, contributing to their NBA and MLB coverage. Other outlets that Aldridge has written and contributed for include ESPN, NBA TV, NBA.com, \"The Washington Post\", \"The Philadelphia Inquirer\", and TBD. In 2016, he was awarded the Curt Gowdy Media Award by the Basketball Hall of Fame."}
{"text":"Aldridge is a graduate of DeMatha Catholic High School and American University and worked as a writer for \"The Washington Post\", where he spent nine years. During that time Aldridge was a beat writer covering Georgetown University basketball, the Washington Bullets, and the Washington Redskins. He also covered the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, national college basketball and football, the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup playoffs, the World Series, the Indianapolis 500, and the U.S. Open tennis championships. To this day he is still an avid fan of American University men's basketball."}
{"text":"Before joining TNT in 2004, Aldridge reported for ESPN for eight years, primarily covering the NBA while occasionally doing NFL pieces. He wrote for ESPN.com and contributed to ESPN Radio. Aldridge frequently appeared on SportsCenter as well as \"NBA 2 Night\" (now \"NBA Fastbreak\") and \"NBA Today.\" Aldridge conducted interviews for the \"SportsCenter\" \"Sunday Conversations\" with LeBron James, Allen Iverson, Shaquille O'Neal, Karl Malone and many others. He worked as an NBA sideline reporter both for ABC and ESPN in 2003 and 2004."}
{"text":"Aldridge worked at \"The Philadelphia Inquirer\" from 2004 to 2008, covering the National Football League and National Basketball Association as a reporter and columnist. He was part of the \"Inquirer\" team that received a second-place award for the series \"The Future of Pro Sports\" in 2005 from the Society of Professional Journalists, Greater Philadelphia Chapter. He was initially scheduled to be one of dozens laid off at the paper in January 2007, but was retained."}
{"text":"He worked as the \"Insider\" for TNT's \"Inside the NBA\" and did sideline reporting work during the regular season, All-Star Weekend and the NBA playoffs. He was also co-host of the weekly show \"The Beat\" on NBA TV, and was a commentator for other \"NBA on TNT\" features. He also worked as a sideline reporter for television broadcasts of college football games and the Major League Baseball divisional series."}
{"text":"From February 2007 through June 2008, Aldridge appeared on \"The Tony Kornheiser Show\" on Washington Post Radio and later WWWT in Washington, D.C. as co-host. He returned as sometime co-host of the latest incarnation on WTEM in September 2009. As of 2016, he is a regular co-host on the show."}
{"text":"In late 2018, Aldridge left Turner Sports to join the staff of \"The Athletic\" as a writer."}
{"text":"Kyle John Baker (born 1965) is an American cartoonist, comic book writer-artist, and animator known for his graphic novels and for a 2000s revival of the series \"Plastic Man\"."}
{"text":"Baker has won numerous Eisner Awards and Harvey Awards for his work in the comics field."}
{"text":"Kyle Baker was born in the Queens, New York City, the son of art director John M. Baker and high-school audiovisual-department manager Eleanor L. Baker. He has a brother and a sister. Their parents had both attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and their father, who, Baker said, \"worked in advertising [and] made junk mail\", would \"draw pictures for us and entertain us.\" Aside from this exposure to art, Baker has said, his early artistic influences included comic book artist Jack Kirby, caricaturist Jack Davis, and painter and magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell. He noted:"}
{"text":"Other influences included the Charlton Comics artwork of Jim Aparo and Steve Ditko."}
{"text":"Baker's first credited work at Marvel is penciling the half-page entry \"Kid Commandos\" in \"The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe\" #13 (February1984). After a handful of inking assignments on issues of \"Transformers\", \"The Avengers Annual\" #14 (1985) and elsewhere, Baker made his professional story-illustration debut as penciler and inker of the publisher Lodestone Comics' \"Codename: Danger\" #2 (October 1985), with a 23-page story written by Brian Marshall, Mike Harris, and Robert Loren Fleming. Cover penciling and more interior inking for Marvel and occasionally DC followed. His first story penciling for one of the two major comics companies was the three-issue \"Howard the Duck: The Movie\" (December 1986 - February 1987), adapting the 1986 film \"Howard the Duck\", and which he self-inked."}
{"text":"During this time, Baker also attempted to sell humor spot illustrations, but was rejected by the major newspaper syndicates. Jim Salicrup, a Marvel editor, did commission him \"to write a few one-panel gags about [the superhero team] the X-Men\", titled \"It's Genetic\" and appearing in the Marvel-produced fan magazine \"Marvel Age\"."}
{"text":"At the recommendation of freelance artist Ron Fontes, an editor at the Dolphin imprint of the publishing house Doubleday expressed interest in Baker's sample strips of the character Cowboy Wally, \"and asked if I had any more. I lied and said I did.\" This led to the 128-page graphic novel \"Cowboy Wally\". \"The character of Noel was pretty much based on me,\" Baker said in 1999. \"I lie all the time. The first part of the books is the collected strips, and the other three chapters were written for the book. \"It didn't sell many copies,\" Baker said, \"but at least it convinced DC [Comics] I should be allowed to draw, not just ink.\""}
{"text":"Baker went on to draw DC's 1980s comics revival of the pulp fiction hero \"The Shadow\", beginning with \"The Shadow Annual\" #2 (1988), followed by the monthly series from issue #7 to the final issue, #19 (February 1988 - January 1989). He did assorted other DC work including \"Justice, Inc.\" In 1990, Baker and writer Len Wein produced three issues of \"Dick Tracy\" for The Walt Disney Company's Hollywood Comics, the first two issues containing original stories, the third an adaption the 1990 \"Dick Tracy\" film."}
{"text":"He began scripting comics around this time: Baker penciled and inked First Comics' \"Classics Illustrated\" #3 & 21 (February 1990 & March 1991), adapting, respectively, \"Through the Looking Glass\" and \"Cyrano de Bergerac\". While Peter David scripted the latter, Baker himself wrote the adaptation of the Lewis Carroll work. \"I'd never planned to become a writer,\" Baker said in 1999. \"I wrote short gags, like the kind you see in the newspapers and Cowboy Wally, but not stories. I only learned to write stories because people kept paying me to write them. In the years 1991-1994, 90 percent of my income was from writing, and I received very few offers to draw. I figured I should learn to write.\""}
{"text":"Baker achieved recognition and won an Eisner Award for his 1990 graphic novel \"Why I Hate Saturn\", published by the DC Comics imprint Piranha Press. Baker said in 1999 of his breakthrough work,"}
{"text":"Baker's cartoons and caricatures began appearing in \"BusinessWeek, Details, Entertainment Weekly, ESPN, Esquire, Guitar World, Mad, National Lampoon, New York, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Us, Vibe\", and \"The Village Voice\". He spent three years illustrating the weekly strip \"Bad Publicity\" for \"New York\" magazine."}
{"text":"Baker's animation has appeared on BET and MTV, and in animated \"Looney Tunes\" projects, including the animated feature \"\". Baker was \"guest art director\" for Cartoon Network's \"Class of 3000\", and storyboarded the \"Class of 3000\" Christmas special."}
{"text":"Baker said in 1999 he was writing a Christmas movie for Paramount Pictures, titled \"U Betta Watch Out\", and was animating a TV-movie title \"Corey Q. Jeeters, I'm Telling on You\"."}
{"text":"At this point in his career, Baker stated in an interview, \"Nobody tells me what to write or how to draw. Only an idiot would dare tell Kyle Baker how to make a good cartoon. Hollywood and the magazine world are full of idiots. They water my stuff down and make it unfunny.\""}
{"text":"He is credited with writing and storyboarding on the \"Phineas and Ferb\" television episodes \"Candace Loses Her Head\" and \"Are You My Mummy?\"."}
{"text":"Baker drew writer Robert Morales' Marvel Comics miniseries \"\" #1-7 (January\u2013July 2003), a Captain America storyline with parallels to the Tuskegee experiment. He also wrote and drew all but two issues (#7 and #12) of the 20-issue comedic adventure series \"Plastic Man\" vol. 4 (February 2004 - March 2006), starring the Golden Age of Comic Books superhero created by Jack Cole for Quality Comics. Baker contributed to the Dark Horse Comics series \"The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist\", a spin-off of Michael Chabon's novel, \"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay\"."}
{"text":"In 2006, his company, Kyle Baker Publishing, serialized a four-part comic book series about Nat Turner, and published the series \"The Bakers\", based on his family life, in two anthologies, \"Cartoonist\" and \"Cartoonist Vol. 2: Now with More Bakers\". He has also continued to provide comics material sporadically to Marvel, DC and Image Comics through at least 2010. In 2007 and 2008, Image Comics published Baker's six-issue Image Comics miniseries \"Special Forces\", a teen-soldier military satire that criticizes the exhortation of felons and disabled Americans into military service. \"The New York Times\" reviewed the 2009 trade-paperback collection of the first four issues, calling it \"the harshest, most serrated satire of the Iraq War yet published.\""}
{"text":"In 2008, Watson-Guptill published \"How to Draw Stupid and Other Essentials of Cartooning\", Baker's art instruction book. That same year, Baker hosted the comics industry's Harvey Awards. In 2010, he became regular artist on Marvel Comics' mature-audience MAX-imprint series, \"Deadpool Max\"."}
{"text":"Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 \u2013 October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic, and editor from New Orleans who wrote for \"The New York Times\". In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, \"Intoxicated by My Illness\" (1992) and \"Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir\" (1993), were published after his death. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, with his family as a youth. His daughter Bliss Broyard wrote and was interviewed about the family."}
{"text":"Anatole Broyard was born in 1920 in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Black Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom had finished elementary school. Broyard was descended from ancestors who were established as free people of color before the Civil War. The first Broyard recorded in Louisiana was a French colonist in the mid-eighteenth century. Broyard was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light-skinned with European features. Their younger sister, Shirley, who eventually married Franklin Williams, an attorney and civil rights leader, had darker skin and African features."}
{"text":"When Broyard was a child during the Depression, his family moved from New Orleans to New York City, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans to the northern industrial cities. His father thought there were more work opportunities in that city."}
{"text":"According to his daughter, Bliss Broyard, \"My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he'd been ostracized by both white and black kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He'd come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn't ask what happened. My mother said that he didn't tell us about his racial background because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did.\""}
{"text":"They lived in a working-class and racially diverse community in Brooklyn. Having grown up in the French Quarter's Creole community, Broyard felt he had little in common with the urban blacks of Brooklyn. He saw his parents \"pass\" as white to get work, as his father found the carpenters union to be racially discriminatory. By high school, the younger Broyard had become interested in artistic and cultural life; his sister Shirley said he was the only one in the family with such interests."}
{"text":"As writer and editor Brent Staples wrote in 2003, \"Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer \u2013 and not just a 'Negro writer' consigned to the back of the literary bus.\" The historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote: \"In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy.\""}
{"text":"Broyard had some stories accepted for publication in the 1940s. He began studying at Brooklyn College before the U.S. entered World War II. When he enlisted in the army, the armed services were segregated and no African Americans were officers. He was accepted as white at enlistment and he took that opportunity to enter and successfully complete officers school. During his service, Broyard was promoted to the rank of captain."}
{"text":"After the war, Broyard maintained his white identity. Staples later noted:"}
{"text":"Those who had escaped the penalties of blackness in the military were often unwilling to go back to second-class citizenship after the war. One demographer estimated that more than 150,000 black people sailed away permanently into whiteness during the 1940s alone, marrying white spouses and most likely cutting off their black families."}
{"text":"Broyard used the GI Bill to study at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. He settled in Greenwich Village, where he became part of its bohemian artistic and literary life. With money saved during the war, Broyard owned a bookstore for a time. As he recounted in a 1979 column:"}
{"text":"Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel... Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity."}
{"text":"Broyard did not identify with or champion black political causes. Because of his artistic ambition, in some circumstances he never acknowledged that he was partially black. On the other hand, Margaret Harrell has written that she and other acquaintances were casually told that he was a writer and black before meeting him, and not in the sense of having to keep it secret. That he was partially black was well known in the Greenwich Village literary and art community from the early 1960s."}
{"text":"During the 1940s, Broyard published stories in \"Modern Writing\", \"Discovery\", and \"New World Writing\", three leading pocket-book format \"little magazines\". He also contributed articles and essays to \"Partisan Review\", \"Commentary\", \"Neurotica\", and New Directions Publishing. Stories of his were included in two anthologies of fiction widely associated with the Beat writers, but Broyard did not identify with them."}
{"text":"He often was said to be working on a novel, but never published one. After the 1950s, Broyard taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and Columbia University, in addition to his regular book reviewing. For nearly fifteen years, Broyard wrote daily book reviews for \"The New York Times\". The editor John Leonard was quoted as saying, \"A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he [Broyard] did it there was no one better.\""}
{"text":"In the late 1970s, Broyard started publishing brief personal essays in the \"Times\", which many people considered among his best work. These were collected in \"Men, Women and Anti-Climaxes\", published in 1980. In 1984 Broyard was given a column in the \"Book Review\", for which he also worked as an editor. He was among those considered \"gatekeepers\" in the New York literary world, whose positive opinions were critical to a writer's success."}
{"text":"Broyard first married Aida Sanchez, a Puerto Rican woman, and they had a daughter, Gala. They divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II."}
{"text":"In 1961, at the age of 40, Broyard married again, to Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a modern dancer and younger woman of Norwegian-American ancestry. They had two children: son Todd, born in 1964, and daughter Bliss, born in 1966. The Broyards raised their children as white in suburban Connecticut. When they had grown to young adults, Sandy urged Broyard to tell them about his family (and theirs), but he never did."}
{"text":"Shortly before he died, Broyard wrote a statement that some people later took to represent his views. In explaining why he so missed his friend the writer Milton Klonsky, with whom he used to talk every day, he said that after Milton died, \"No one talked to me as an equal.\" Although critics framed the issue of Broyard's identity as one of race, Broyard wanted personal equality and acceptance: he wanted neither to be talked down to nor to be looked up to, as he believed either masked the true human being."}
{"text":"Sandy told their children of their father's secret before his death. Broyard died in October 1990 of prostate cancer, which had been diagnosed in 1989. His first wife and child were not mentioned in his \"The New York Times\" obituary."}
{"text":"Novelist Chandler Brossard, who knew Broyard in the late 1940s, based a character on him in his first novel, \"Who Walk in Darkness\" (1952). After the manuscript was submitted to New Directions Publishing, poet Delmore Schwartz read it and informed Broyard that the character Henry Porter was based on him; Broyard threatened to sue unless the novel's opening line was changed. It originally had read \"People said Henry Porter was a 'passed Negro,'\" which Brossard reluctantly changed to \"People said Henry Porter was an illegitimate.\" Brossard restored his original text for a 1972 paperback edition."}
{"text":"Novelist William Gaddis, who likewise knew Broyard in the late 1940s, modeled a character named \"Max\" on Broyard in his first novel, \"The Recognitions\" (1955)."}
{"text":"Given Broyard's stature in the literary world and discussions about his life after his death, numerous literary critics, such as Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, Tour\u00e9, and Brent Staples, have made comparisons between the character Coleman Silk in Philip Roth's \"The Human Stain\" (2000) and Broyard."}
{"text":"Some speculated that Roth had been inspired by Broyard's life, and commented on the larger issues of race and identity in American society. Roth stated in a 2008 interview, however, that Broyard was not his source of inspiration. He explained that he had only learned about Broyard's black ancestry and choices from the Gates \"New Yorker\" article, published months after he had already started writing the novel. He, instead, said in the open letter that his inspiration was Melvin Tumin, a longtime friend."}
{"text":"In 1996, six years after Broyard's death, Henry Louis Gates criticized the writer, in a profile entitled \"White Like Me\" in \"The New Yorker\", for concealing his African-American ancestry. Gates expanded his essay in \"The Passing of Anatole Broyard\", a piece published the next year in his \"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man\" (1997). Gates felt that Broyard had deceived friends and family by \"passing\" as white, but also understood his literary ambition. He wrote,"}
{"text":"When those of mixed ancestry\u2014and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry\u2014disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally accused of running from their \"blackness.\" Yet why isn't the alternative a matter of running to their \"whiteness\"?"}
{"text":"In 2007, Broyard's daughter, Bliss, published a memoir, \"One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets\". (The title related to the \"one-drop rule\". Adopted into law in most southern states in the early twentieth century, it divided society into two groups, whites and blacks, classifying all persons with any known black ancestry as black.) Her book explored her psychological and physical journeys as she met members of her father's extended family in New York, New Orleans, and on the West Coast, and her developing ideas about her own identity and life."}
{"text":"John William Dunjee (also John Dungy or John Dungee) (1833 \u2013 1903) was an American missionary, educator, Baptist minister, publisher, agent of Storer College and founder of Baptist churches across the United States."}
{"text":"Dunjee also played a particularly prominent role in supporting Storer College as an agent for the school, a Freewill Baptist College for African Americans in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. William Still, the abolitionist, who helped facilitate Dunjee's escape from slavery, also served as a trustee of Storer."}
{"text":"After his work at Storer, Dunjee next became a minister with the Baptist Home Missionary Society. He traveled throughout the country from New England to the South to the Midwest preaching and starting new Baptist churches for African Americans in mainly rural areas."}
{"text":"Dunjee was also an involved supporter of many other African-American educational institutions, such as Spelman College, Shaw College, Hampton College, and Langston University. His friends included such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass. Additionally, Dunjee founded the \"Harper's Ferry Messenger\" in 1882 and served as business manager. His children Drusilla Dunjee Houston, a historian, and Roscoe Dunjee later contributed to the \"Messenger\" and were editors of the \"Black Dispatch\" in Oklahoma."}
{"text":"John Dunjee died in Oklahoma City in 1903."}
{"text":"Joy DeGruy (n\u00e9e Leary) is an author, academic, and public speaker who previously served as assistant professor at the Portland State University School of Social Work. She is current president and CEO of DeGruy Publications, Inc. She is most known for her book \"Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome,\" originally published by UpTone Press in 2005. DeGruy and her research projects have featured in news and activist coverage of contemporary African-American social issues, in addition to public lectures and workshops on U.S. college campuses."}
{"text":"DeGruy's family background is from the American south. She grew up in South Central, Los Angeles where she graduated from Crenshaw High School. She recommends the book \"The Warmth of Other Suns\" as a source of insight into her family."}
{"text":"She holds a bachelor's of science in Communication, two master's degrees (in Social Work and Clinical Psychology), and a Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Research from Portland State University's Graduate School of Social Work. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2001, studied predictive variables for African American Male Youth Violence using Sociocultural Theory, Social Learning Theory and Trauma Theory frameworks; she also employed the \"new\" theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, which would later become the subject of her 2005 book. Professor Eileen M. Brennan served as DeGruy's dissertation advisor."}
{"text":"DeGruy's theorization is based on qualitative and quantitative research conducted by the author in both America and Africa."}
{"text":"The New Republic described the theory as \"original thinking\" that \"explains[s] the effects of unresolved trauma on the behaviors of blacks that is transmitted from generation to generation,\" and suggested that the theory can be historicized more broadly alongside \"new emphasis\" on trauma-informed care in social work writ large. The California Institute of Integral studies has said P.T.S.S. \"lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal.\""}
{"text":"DeGruy's theory is not without controversy. P.T.S.S. has been criticized by scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi, who included it in his . P.T.S.S. has also come under fire by politically conservative advocacy group The National Association of Scholars. Among academics, critical engagement with P.T.S.S. formed the subject of subsequent doctoral dissertation work, which demonstrated that further research was needed to determine the theory's applicability. Critics have suggested that as an alternative to \"pathologizing\" African Americans, \"future research should focus on the mental illness of African Americans' oppressors.\""}
{"text":"In addition to P.T.S.S. theory, DeGruy co-developed the African American Adolescent Respect Scale, to serve as a practical measure of prosocial attitudes held by male adolescents. Other published work by DeGruy includes a chapter in \"Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations,\" edited by Raymond Winbush. She has participated in a wide array of public speaking engagements for non-profit organizations, colleges, and universities and has featured in publication lineups alongside the likes of Angela Davis. She is represented as a public speaker by the national organization Speak Out: The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture."}
{"text":"Valorie Burton is a life coach, author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute (CaPP)."}
{"text":"Burton has been featured on the TODAY Show and the Dr. Oz Show and has made regular appearances on CNN and HLN. She has written for Oprah Magazine, Essence Magazine and many others. She was a columnist for BlackAmericaWeb.com and is a frequent guest on CNN's \"Reclaim Your Career\" segment."}
{"text":"Burton co-hosted the Emmy-award-winning television program Aspiring Women, which aired on the Total Living Network (TLN). She has also co-hosted the national television program The Potter\u2019s Touch with T.D. Jakes which aired weekdays on the TBN and BET."}
{"text":"Burton is a former Miss Black Texas USA, Miss Black USA \"top 10\" finalist, and a runner-up to Miss Texas. Ms. Burton is a credentialed member of the International Coach Federation and a member of the National Speakers Association."}
{"text":"Burton graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a master's degree in applied positive psychology. She is also a graduate of Florida State University and has a master's degree in journalism from Florida A&M University."}
{"text":"Burton is author of several books including \"Successful Women Think Differently\", \"What's Really Holding You Back\", and \"Happy Women Live Better\", \"Rich Minds Rich Rewards\", \"How Did I Get So Busy\", \"Listen to Your Life\", \"Why Not You? 28 Days to Authentic Confidence\", \"Start Here Start Now\", \"Get Unstuck, Be Unstoppable\", and \"Where Will You Go From Here?\", and \"Successful Women Speak Differently\"."}
{"text":"In \"Rich Minds, Rich Rewards\" (2001), she describes ways to focus \"on what's truly important in life.\" In \"What's Really Holding You Back?\" (2005), Burton tackles fear, uncertainty and anxiety and how people can free themselves of fear. \"Library Journal\" calls \"How Did I Get So Busy?\" (2007) more than a \"quick fix.\" Her book \"Why Not You?\" (2008), contains practical tips and a questionnaire for readers to \"identify which four confidence levels they embody.\""}
{"text":"In 2020, Burton released her most recent book, \"Life Coaching for Successful Women\" and advice on New Year's resolution to loudly tell your goals and start with baby steps. Burton also gave decision-making advice, \"Without understanding God deep in our hearts, there is no success\"."}
{"text":"Ashanti Omowali Alston (born 1954) is an anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, and former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. From 1974-1985 he spent time in prison for bank robbery which caused him to become further engaged in politics. He is currently on the Steering Committee of the Jericho Movement to free what they refer to as \u201cpolitical prisoners\u201d in the US. Alston resides in Providence, Rhode Island."}
{"text":"Both Malcolm X's assassination and the Newark riots influenced Alston's decision to join the Black Panther Party at age 17, as he believed the Panthers were \"taking Malcolm's teachings to the next level\". At this time, Alston attended Nation of Islam meetings despite not being a member himself. He also felt a strong disdain for white people; however, upon joining the Panthers he changed his views."}
{"text":"Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, and prison."}
{"text":"Alston observed much sexism during his time in the Black Panther Party, despite the group's stated intention of gender equality, which he didn't fully realize until his stint in prison. However, he has acknowledged that some women still felt empowered by the Black Panther Party to fight sexism despite experiencing it within the party, recalling, \"Sisters would tell you that because everybody had guns there were certain ways that they could tell a brother, 'you're not going to fuck with me, I'm not going to be your sexual object because I got a gun'.\""}
{"text":"In 1984, Alston married fellow BPP and BLA member Safiya Bukhari."}
{"text":"Jeannette Caines was an American author of children's books, most notably \"Abby\", \"Chilly Stomach\" and \"Just Us Women\", a \"Reading Rainbow\" book. She was born and raised in Harlem, New York and worked as a Manuscript Coordinator. In 1989, Jeannette retired and relocated to Charlottesville, VA. She was the recipient of the National Black Child Developmental Institute's Certificate of Merit and Appreciation and the Charlottesville Lifetime Achievement Award (2004). In addition to this, Jeannette was the owner\/operator of a small book store located in Charlottesville named THE PURPLE ALLIGATOR. Later in 2004, she was diagnosed with cancer and died on July 11. She had two children Alexander (deceased 2015) and Abby who still resides in New York."}
{"text":"Augusta Braxton Baker (April 1, 1911 \u2013 February 23, 1998) was an American librarian and storyteller. She was known for her contributions to children\u2019s literature, especially regarding the portrayal of black Americans in works for children."}
{"text":"Augusta Braxton Baker was born on April 1, 1911, in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of her parents were schoolteachers, who instilled in her a love of reading. During the day while her parents worked, her grandmother, Augusta Fax (from whom she received her name) cared for her and told her stories. Baker delighted in these stories, carrying her love for them throughout her life. She learned to read before starting elementary school, later enrolling in the (racially segregated) black high school where her father taught, and graduating at the age of 16. Baker then entered the University of Pittsburgh, where she both met and married James Baker by the end of her sophomore year."}
{"text":"After graduation, Baker taught for a few years, until she was hired in 1937 as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library's 135th Street Branch (now the Countee Cullen Regional Branch) in Harlem. Moore applied three times before the head of children\u2019s services, Anne Carroll Moore, took a personal interest in her application. Moore later berated the director of the library for not passing along the application, as she was interested in anyone who showed an affinity for children's work"}
{"text":"In 1939, the branch began an effort to find and collect children's literature that portrayed black people as something other than \"servile buffoons,\" speaking in a rude dialect, and other such stereotypes. This collection, founded by Baker as the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Children's Books, led to the publication of the first of a number of bibliographies of books for and about black children. Baker furthered this project by encouraging authors, illustrators, and publishers to produce, as well as libraries to acquire, books depicting blacks in a favorable light."}
{"text":"In 1946, she published an extensive bibliography of titles relating to the black experience titled \"Books about Negro Life for Children.\" In a 1943 article Baker stated her criteria for selection. The books included should be ones, \u201cthat give an unbiased, accurate, well rounded picture of Negro life in all parts of the world.\u201d The lists and the standards were freely distributed from 135th Street Branch in Harlem. Many librarians, editors, and authors of the time used the lists in conjunction with their own work. In 1971, it was retitled \"The Black Experience in Children's Books,\" and its criteria played an important part in bringing awareness about harmful stereotypes in Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo."}
{"text":"In 1974, Baker retired from the New York Public Library. However, in 1980, she returned to librarianship to assume the newly created Storyteller-in-Residence position at the University of South Carolina; this was also the first such position in any American university at the time. She remained there until her second retirement in 1994. During her time there, Baker cowrote a book entitled \"Storytelling: Art and Technique\" with colleague Ellin Green, which was published in 1987."}
{"text":"After a long illness, Baker died at the age of 86 on February 23, 1998. Her legacy has remained even today, particularly through the \"Baker\u2019s Dozen: A Celebration of Stories\" annual storytelling festival. Sponsored by the University of South Carolina College of Information and Communications and the Richland County Public Library, this festival originated in 1987 during Baker\u2019s time at the University, and is celebrated still to this day."}
{"text":"When asked: \u201cWhat do you tell your students when you conduct your workshops?\u201d Baker stated:"}
{"text":"\u201cI tell them what I\u2019ve always said. Let the story tell itself, and if it is a good story and you have prepared it well, you do not need all the extras - the costumes, the histrionics, the high drama. Children of all ages do want to hear stories. Select well, prepare well, and then go forth, stand tall, and just tell\u201d"}
{"text":"Her legacy also continues through the Augusta Baker Collection of Children's Literature and Folklore at the University of South Carolina. The collection, donated by her son, James H. Baker III, contains over 1,600 children's books, including materials from her personal and working library, as well as papers, illustrations, and anthologies of folktales Baker used during her career."}
{"text":"From Janice M. Del Negro, former Editor of \"The Bulletin for Children's Books\":"}
{"text":"Kevin Brown (born September 3, 1960) is a biographer, essayist and translator who has authored or contributed to three books."}
{"text":"Kevin Brown has published brief lives of Romare Bearden and Malcolm X. He was a contributing editor to \"The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference\""}
{"text":"Since 1978, many of Brown's essays, articles and reviews on the visual arts, cinema, dance, literature, music and politics have appeared in \"Afterimage\", the \"American Book Review\", \"American Visions\", the \"Chicago Review\", the \"Kansas City Star\", \"Kirkus Reviews\", the \"Times Literary Supplement\", \"The Nation\", \"New York Newsday\", the \"Oakland Tribune\", the \"Threepenny Review\". and the \"Washington Post Bookworld\", among others."}
{"text":"Brown's 2005 translation into Spanish of Virginia Woolf's little known essay \"Reviewing\" appeared in the Iowa University journal of literary translation \"eXchanges\". His profile of translator Gregory Rabassa was published in 2006 by the University of Delaware's \"Review of Latin American Studies\"."}
{"text":"Brown's mother, Duan Nimmons, was born (1940) in New York City, where her family had been active in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s. His maternal great-grandmother was Ida Mae Roberson (later, Ida Cullen-Cooper), widow of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. Countee Cullen was a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High school, where James Baldwin was among his students. Prior to his marriage to Ida Mae Roberson, Countee Cullen had briefly been the son-in-law of W.E.B. Du Bois."}
{"text":"From 1980 to 1984, in San Francisco, Brown studied Latin and Greek with a private tutor, reading widely in the works of the ancients and the French as well as contemporary post-war writers like Gore Vidal. He began publishing book reviews on writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf in newspapers such as the \"Oakland Tribune\" as well as longer essays on Spanish cinema and James Baldwin in the \"Threepenny Review\""}
{"text":"In 1986, Brown moved to New York, attending the Columbia University School of General Studies for one year before transferring to the City University of New York. There, he double-majored in Spanish as well as Translating & Interpreting, completing his undergraduate degree in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, headquartered at the Graduate Center. He studied with literary translator Gregory Rabassa, among others."}
{"text":"Brown lived in New York for 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, during which time he married and had a son. His son has rose to notoriety for being the youngest person to ever simultaneously whip and nae-nae. Brown returned to California in 2007, and currently lives in San Diego."}
{"text":"In 1985, Brown worked as an editorial assistant in the publishing industry in New York, and contributed to the \"London Times Literary Supplement\". From 1987 to 1989, Brown was a regular contributor to \"Kirkus Reviews\", where he published book reviews on subjects as various as Africa, African-American writers, 20th century American poetry, Anglo-American common law, Australian-New Zealand writers, French history and literature, the Harlem Renaissance, music, photography, politics. During the 1990s, he traveled in Central America and Eastern Europe, contributed to the \"American Book Review\", \"American Visions\" and \"New York Newsday\", and contracted to begin work on a series of biographies on Romare Bearden, Malcolm X and Countee Cullen."}
{"text":"Commissioned in 1993, just after the release of Spike Lee's movie on the same subject, Brown's second book attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Malcolm X as well as that of rival leader Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights and black nationalist movements."}
{"text":"At Queens College and other campuses throughout the 23-college CUNY system, Kevin Brown studied both literary as well as technical translation with Gregory Rabassa and other faculty from Spain and Latin America. His profile-interview of Rabassa appeared in the University of Delaware's \"Review of Latin American Studies\"."}
{"text":"William Patrick Foster (August 25, 1919 \u2013 August 28, 2010), also known as The Law and The Maestro, was the director of the noted Florida A&M University Marching \"100\". He served as the band's director from 1946 to his retirement in 1998. His innovations revolutionized college marching band technique and the perceptions of the collegiate band. Foster was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, the National Association for Distinguished Band Conductors Hall of Fame, the Florida Music Educators Association Hall of Fame and the Afro-American Hall of Fame among others. He also served as the president of the American Bandmasters Association and was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Bill Clinton. Foster wrote the book titled \"The Man Behind the Baton\"."}
{"text":"The original FAMU Band was organized in 1892 under the leadership of P.A. Van Weller. At that time, the school was still known as the State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students. When Foster became the director of bands in 1946, the school was known as the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes. Foster brought over 30 new techniques to the band, which have now become standard procedure for high school and college bands nationwide."}
{"text":"Under his direction, the Marching \"100\" appeared in films, commercials, numerous magazine and newspaper articles, nationally televised performances. In 1989, the French chose Foster and his band as America's official representative in the Bastille Day Parade, celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. On January 27, 1996, the Marching \"100\" was the center-piece of the Opening Ceremonies of the Walt Disney Indy 200. The Band was also the featured attraction at the Fifteenth and Twenty-fifth Anniversary National Telecast of Walt Disney World in 1986 and 1996. In January 1993 and 1997, the band appeared in the Inaugural Parade of President Bill Clinton."}
{"text":"The collective style of the FAMU marching band evolved by happenstance during band practice in 1946. \"Our first dance routine, I don't know how or why it came about,\" said Foster, in his book \"Band Pageantry, A Guide for the Marching Band\". Foster's break with tradition was a fanfare that trumpeted the changing of the guard in marching band style and forever changed the look, feel and emotion associated with halftime performances. The block, militaristic, corps style immediately became secondary to Foster's upbeat, high-energy shows and, by the '60s, bands such as Grambling, Southern and Tennessee State in addition to Florida A&M began to garner national attention."}
{"text":"Foster's innovations made for a quantum leap for a U.S. marching band scene, which had already witnessed lagging interest in live band concerts as the numbers of radio and vinyl-record fans began to soar. While educators saw bands as a way to teach music to large numbers of students, few college bands existed around the turn of the century. Those that did were usually either small and informal club-like organizations modeled on the community bands, or ROTC bands modeled on the music of the military."}
{"text":"\"I don't know what possessed me to go to the dean's office, but I was there and he asked me what I wanted to do,\" recalled Foster in his book on marching band technique. \"I told him I wanted to be a conductor, but he said, 'You should rethink that. There are no jobs for colored conductors.' And he was right! So I wanted to develop a band that would be better than any white band in the country.\""}
{"text":"At FAMU, Foster began redefining band pageantry with a showy style\u2014rapid tempos, high-stepping, dancing, etc., which was eschewed by some band directors who continued to cling to more staid military tradition and its emphasis on correct carriage and marching precision."}
{"text":"Foster has been credited with developing at least 30 new marching band techniques, including the double-time marching step of 240 steps per minute or four steps per second, and the triple-time marching step of 360 steps per minute, the death-slow cadence of 20 steps per minute or one step every three seconds, and memorization of all music played in stands, parades, pre-game and halftime shows."}
{"text":"Foster authored 18 articles for professional journals, 4 published marching band shows, and the textbook, \"Band Pageantry\", considered \"The Bible\" for the marching band. He is the composer of \"Marche Brillante\", \"National Honors March\", \"March Continental\", and \"Centennial Celebration\"."}
{"text":"Foster was the first recipient of the United States Achievement Academy Hall of Fame Award and the Outstanding Educator Award presented by the School of Education Society of the University of Kansas Alumni Association. In 1992, \"Sports Illustrated\" declared The 100 as the best marching band in the country. In 1998, Foster was inducted as a Great Floridian by the Museum of Florida History. He was also a director of the prestigious McDonald's All-American High School Band (1980\u20131992)."}
{"text":"President Bill Clinton nominated and the United States Congress approved Foster as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Foster was a member of the Hall of Fame of the following organizations: Music Educators National Conference; the Florida Music Educators Association, Florida A&M University Sports, the National High School Band Directors, and the Afro-American Hall of Fame."}
{"text":"He was a Board member with G. Leblanc Corporation, John Philip Sousa Foundation, International Music Festival, Inc., and the Marching Musician. On December 17, 1998, the Board of Electors in Chicago, Illinois elected Foster to the National Band Association Hall of Fame of Distinguished Band Conductors, the most prestigious honor a bandmaster can receive."}
{"text":"On August 23, 2010, Foster, who had been a resident of Miracle Hill nursing home in Tallahassee, Florida, was admitted to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. He died on August 28, 2010 at 12:01 AM. His funeral was held in Florida A&M University's Lee Hall on September 4, 2010. He was 91 years old."}
{"text":"John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark; January 1, 1915 - July 16, 1998) was an American historian, professor, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s."}
{"text":"He was born John Henry Clark on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, the youngest child of John Clark, a sharecropper, and Willie Ella Clark, a washer woman, who passed away in 1922. ). With the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the closest mill town in Columbus, Georgia."}
{"text":"Counter to his mother's wishes for him to become a farmer, Clarke left Georgia in 1933 by freight train and went to Harlem, New York as part of the Great Migration of rural blacks out of the South to northern cities. There he pursued scholarship and activism. He renamed himself as John Henrik (after rebel Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an \"e\" to his surname, spelling it as \"Clarke\". He also joined the U.S. Army during World War II."}
{"text":"Clarke was heavily influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop, which inspired his piece \"The Historical Legacy of Cheikh Anta Diop: His Contributions to a New Concept of African History\". Clarke believed that the credited Greek philosophers gained much of their theories and thoughts from contact with Africans, who influenced the early Western world."}
{"text":"Clarke was a professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1969 to 1986, where he served as founding chairman of the department. He also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University\u2019s Africana Studies and Research Center. Additionally, in 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association and the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association."}
{"text":"In its obituary of Clarke, \"The New York Times\" noted that the activist's ascension to professor emeritus at Hunter College was \"unusual... without benefit of a high school diploma, let alone a Ph.D.\" It acknowledged that \"nobody said Professor Clarke wasn't an academic original. \" In 1994, Clarke earned a doctorate from the non-accredited Pacific Western University (now California Miramar University) in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelor's degree there in 1992."}
{"text":"By the 1920s, the Great Migration and demographic changes had led to a concentration of African Americans living in Harlem. A synergy developed among the artists, writers, and musicians and many figured in the Harlem Renaissance. They began to implement supporting structures of study groups and informal workshops to develop newcomers and young people."}
{"text":"Arriving in Harlem at the age of 18 in 1933, Clarke developed as a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years. He joined study circles such as the Harlem History Club and the Harlem Writers' Workshop. He studied intermittently at New York University, Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School of Social Research and the League for Professional Writers. He was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. From 1941 to 1945, Clarke served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army Air Forces, ultimately attaining the rank of master sergeant."}
{"text":"In the post-World War II era, there was new artistic development, with small presses and magazines being founded and surviving for brief times. Writers and publishers continued to start new enterprises: Clarke was co-founder of the \"Harlem Quarterly\" (1949\u201351), book review editor of the \"Negro History Bulletin\" (1948\u201352), associate editor of the magazine, \"Freedomways,\" and a feature writer for the black-owned \"Pittsburgh Courier\"."}
{"text":"Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958. Traveling in West Africa in 1958\u201359, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he had mentored as a student in the US, and was offered a job working as a journalist for the \"Ghana Evening News\". He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, including in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan."}
{"text":"Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke founded professional associations to support the study of black culture. He was a founder with Leonard Jeffries and first president of the African Heritage Studies Association, which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature, and the arts. He was a founding member of other organizations to support work in black culture: the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and the African-American Scholars' Council."}
{"text":"Clarke's first marriage was to the mother of his daughter Lillie (who died before her father). They divorced."}
{"text":"In 1961, Clarke married Eugenia Evans in New York, and together they had a son and daughter: Nzingha Marie and Sonni Kojo. The marriage ended in divorce."}
{"text":"In 1997, John Henrik Clarke married his longtime companion, Sybil Williams. He died of a heart attack on July 16, 1998, at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. He was buried in Green Acres Cemetery, Columbus, Georgia."}
{"text":"Henry Walton Bibb (May 10, 1815 in Shelby County, Kentucky \u2013 1854) was an American author and abolitionist who was born a slave. After escaping from slavery to Canada, he founded an abolitionist newspaper, \"The Voice of the Fugitive\". He returned to the US and lectured against slavery."}
{"text":"Bibb was born to an enslaved woman, Milldred Jackson, on a Cantalonia, Kentucky, plantation on May 10, 1815. His people told him his white father was James Bibb, a Kentucky state senator, but Henry never knew him. As he was growing up, Bibb saw each of his six younger siblings, all boys, sold away. Bibb was also very attached to his original owner's dog, which he named Geels, but the dog passed away at only 5 years of age."}
{"text":"In 1833, Bibb married another enslaved mulatto, Malinda, who lived in Oldham County, Kentucky. They had a daughter, Mary Frances."}
{"text":"In 1842, he managed to flee to Detroit, from where he hoped to gain the freedom of his wife and daughter. After finding out that Malinda had been sold as a mistress to a white planter, Bibb focused on his career as an abolitionist. He traveled and lectured throughout the United States."}
{"text":"In 1849-50 he published his autobiography \"Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself\", which became one of the best known slave narratives of the antebellum years. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the danger to Bibb and his second wife, Mary E. Miles. It required Northerners to cooperate in the capture of escaped slaves. To ensure their safety, the Bibbs migrated to Canada and settled in Sandwich, Upper Canada, now Windsor, Ontario."}
{"text":"In 1851, he set up the first black newspaper in Canada, \"The Voice of the Fugitive\". The paper helped develop a more sympathetic climate for blacks in Canada as well as helped new arrivals to adjust. Due to his fame as an author, Bibb was reunited with three of his brothers, who separately had also escaped from slavery to Canada. In 1852 he published their accounts in his newspaper."}
{"text":"He died on August 1, 1854, at Windsor, Canada West, at the age of 39."}
{"text":"When she was 13, Clarke crossed a picket line of African-American activists protesting segregation at Woolworth's on 14th Street, believing that this was a rebellious act. However, when she came home her mother, a staunch union member, told her never to cross a picket line again, educating her about the role of direct action politics in the civil rights movement. At 16, Clarke was allowed by her parents to attend the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with them, despite their concerns that there might be violence. The day before the march, on the way downtown to acquire information about the route, she ran into Martin Luther King Jr., who would deliver his \"I Have a Dream\" speech the next day."}
{"text":"Clarke is the author of four collections of poetry: \"Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women\" (originally self-published in 1981 and distributed by in 1982); and for Firebrand Books \"Living as a Lesbian\" (1986), \"Humid Pitch\" (1989) and \"Experimental Love\" (1993)."}
{"text":"She also published \"After Mecca \u2014 Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement\" (Rutgers University Press, 2005), the first study of its kind that made more visible the contributions of black women to a field that traditionally recognized black men, and \"Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980\u20132005\" (Carroll & Graf Publishing, 2006), a collection that represented 25 years of published writing."}
{"text":"Clarke has served on the editorial collective of \"Conditions\", an early lesbian publication, and has been published in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including \"Conditions 5, The Black Women's Issue\" (1979), ' (1982), ' (1984), \"The Black Scholar\", \"The Kenyon Review\", \"Feminist Review of Books\", \"Belles Lettres\", \"The Gay Community News\". Clarke's iconic articles, \"Lesbianism: an act of resistance\" and \"The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community\", published in \"This Bridge\" and \"Home Girls\", respectively, are often included in women studies, black studies, and English studies curricula."}
{"text":"Clarke's fifth book of poetry, \"By My Precise Haircut\" (2016), is published by The Word Works Books of Washington, D.C., a press committed to the publication of contemporary poetry."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community\u201d (1983)."}
{"text":"Clarke concludes that Black people must be committed to eliminating homophobia in the community by engaging in discussion with advocates for gay and lesbian liberation, educating ourselves about gay and lesbian politics, confronting homophobic attitudes within ourself and others, and understanding how these attitudes prevent us from being totally liberated."}
{"text":"Clarke has served on a number of boards and community organizations, including New York Women Against Rape (1985), New Jersey Women and AIDS Network, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Currently, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Newark Pride Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ advocacy and programming in the city of Newark, New Jersey. She lives and writes in Jersey City, New Jersey."}
{"text":"(Bishop) Yvette A. Flunder (born July 29, 1955) is an American womanist, preacher, pastor, activist, and singer from San Francisco, CA. She is the senior pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland, California and Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries."}
{"text":"Flunder was born in San Francisco, California and raised between the Bay Area and Mississippi. She graduated High School from Church of God in Christ\u2019s Saints Academy in Lexington, Mississippi before returning to California. She was raised in the Church of God in Christ. In 1984 she began singing and recording with Walter Hawkins and the Love Center Choir, where she was the lead singer. She was later ordained by Hawkins."}
{"text":"Flunder earned an undergraduate degree from College of San Mateo. She then went on to receive a Certificate of Ministry Studies and a Master of Arts in 1997 from the Pacific School of Religion, before earning her Doctor of Ministry degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary in 2001."}
{"text":"In 2000 she founded the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a trans-denominational coalition of Christian churches who \"desire to celebrate and proclaim the radically inclusive love of Jesus Christ\", and was appointed its Presiding Bishop in 2003."}
{"text":"Flunder identifies as a womanist and a reconciling liberation theologian. In 2005 she authored a book, \"Where the Edge Gathers: Building a Community of Radical Inclusion\". Carlton Pearson cites her among the first religious leaders to embrace and encourage him after he was declared a heretic due to coming out in support of universal reconciliation."}
{"text":"In 2013 she was named as a Distinguished Alumna of the Pacific School of Religion. On December 1, 2014, Flunder was a keynote speaker in the White House for World AIDS Day, where she described the harmful effects of stigma and homophobia on those living with HIV and on AIDS education in general.The following year she was a guest speaker at the American Baptist College's Garnett-Nabrit Lecture Series."}
{"text":"Since 2015 Flunder has been a member of the board of trustees of the Starr King School for the Ministry and also served as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV\/AIDS."}
{"text":"Flunder's spouse is Shirley Miller, the cousin of Walter Hawkins; they have been committed partners since the mid-1980s."}
{"text":"Bishop Flunder was raised in the \"womb\" of the church coming from church founding families in the Bay Area."}
{"text":"From a young age, Flunder's life reflected her beliefs to treat people with value and equality. In 1986, Flunder was moved to minister to people with HIV\/AIDS in response to the epidemic of the 1980s. She founded several not-for-profit enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area, providing services for people affected by HIV: Hazard-Ashley House, Walker House and Restoration House, through the Ark of Refuge, Inc., which later became the Y. A. Flunder Foundation, and is now City of Refuge."}
{"text":"In 1991, she founded the City of Refuge under the United Church of Christ, \"in order to unite a gospel ministry with a social ministry\". She describes the City of Refuge UCC as an effort to \"create a spiritual community that will embrace our collective cultures, faith paths, gender expressions, and sexual\/affectional orientations while simultaneously freeing us from oppressive theologies that subjugate women, denigrate the LGBT community, and disconnect us from justice issues locally and globally\". The Transcendence Gospel Choir was a community choir affiliated with the City of Refuge and was the first all-transgender choir in the United States."}
{"text":"Flunder's work expands into digital spaces. In 2021 she was a panelist for \"Fire and Desire\" the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's Center for the Study of African American Religious Life as they discussed \"Black Male Gospel Music Performance\""}
{"text":"Flunder was portrayed by actress Phylicia Rashad for the final 3-part episode as part of the Dustin Lance Black mini-series \"When We Rise\" on March 3, 2017 on the major television network ABC. The Bishop's role in the show highlights the compassion of the church, the commitment of its leadership and the loving home the church provides to minister in the tough, primarily African-American community in San Francisco."}
{"text":"Flunder was also depicted by Joni Bovill in the Joshua Marston drama film \"Come Sunday\", which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was released on Netflix in April 2018."}
{"text":"Flunder is active on many social media platforms using her platforms to consistently advocate for black lives, queer lives, medical accessibility, and destigmatization of HIV+ lives."}
{"text":"in 2021, Flunder was featured in PBS's \"The Black Church: This is our story, this is our song.\""}
{"text":"Birthing the Sermon: Women Preachers on the Creative Process"}
{"text":"Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms"}
{"text":"The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. \"Niggerati\" is a portmanteau of \"nigger\" and \"literati\". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal \"FIRE!!\" (which lasted for one issue in 1926), such as Richard Bruce Nugent (the associate editor of the journal), Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas."}
{"text":"The African-American bourgeoisie tried to distance itself from the slavery of the past and sought social equality and racial integration. The Niggerati themselves appeared to be relatively comfortable with their diversity of gender, skin color, and background. After producing \"FIRE!!\", which failed because of a lack of funding, Thurman persuaded the Niggerati to produce another magazine, \"Harlem\". This, too, lasted only a single issue."}
{"text":"Whilst Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman were comfortable with the appellation, others were less so. Cullen, for example, found Carl Van Vechten's novel \"Nigger Heaven\" so offensive that he refused to talk to him for 14 years. Hurston, though, had no trouble with language that challenged the sensibilities of others. She dubbed the well-heeled white liberals who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance \"Negrotarians\" (c.f. rotarian)."}
{"text":"In a final irony, the printer gave the entire print run of the magazine to the Niggerati, in the hope that they would sell better in quantity, only for several hundred copies to be lost in a fire in the basement in which they were stored. Hurston later commented \"I suppose that 'Fire' has gone to ashes quite, but I still think the idea is good.\"."}
{"text":"The Niggerati sought to challenge borgeoise attitudes with \"FIRE!!\", and intended it (in Thurman's own words from his solicitation letters) to be \"provocative ... to provide the shocks necessary to encourage new types of artistic interest and new types of artistic energy\". However, their efforts failed. They were not taken very seriously. Most of the negative reactions were little stronger than slaps on the wrist. Locke criticized their \"effete echoes of contemporary decadence\" and yet praised their anti-Puritanism. The NAACP even handled some of the journal's prepublication publicity. Du Bois, editor of \"Crisis\", simply ignored them."}
{"text":"Like \"FIRE!!\", \"Harlem\" also failed, with the readership responding unfavourably. Nugent wrote to Peterson after the publication of the first issue, expressing his disappointment and blaming the failure on \"Wally's\" editorship. According to Nugent, neither Alexander nor Douglas had been able, nor had had the strength, to counteract Thurman. Nugent himself had been on tour, with the cast of \"Porgy\", whilst the issue was being edited. Nugent distanced himself from the magazine, and wanted it made clear to Van Vechten that he had not been \"in any way responsible for the perpetration of \"Harlem\"\". In December 1928, Thurman resigned from the magazine's editorial board."}
{"text":"Rich Benjamin is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author."}
{"text":"Benjamin is perhaps best known for the non-fiction book \"Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America\". Benjamin's investigation of Whitopia was the subject of a TED Talk."}
{"text":"He is also a lecturer and a public intellectual, who has discussed issues on NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. His writing has appeared in \"The New York Times\", \"The New Yorker\", \"The Guardian\" and the \"Los Angeles Times.\""}
{"text":"Benjamin's work focuses on United States politics and culture, comparative world politics, money, class, Blacks, Whites, Latinos, public policy, global cultural transformation, and demographic change."}
{"text":"In 2017, Benjamin left his tenure as Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the think tank Demos."}
{"text":"Born in the small rural town of Dermott, Arkansas to Robert and Janie Alexander, Larry is the fourth of ten children and the second of the union of his parents. His father was a truck driver, and his mother was a beautician. Alexander began drawing at about the age of four. He never received any formal art training during any level of his schooling while growing up, as none was available in his small rural hometown. After graduating from Dermott High School in May 1971, Alexander moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he studied Architectural Residential Design at Pines Vocational Technical School, now Southeast Arkansas College. In later years he also attended Richland College in Dallas, Texas where he studied AutoCAD."}
{"text":"Today, six pieces of his work from his popular \"Dermott Series\", a series of paintings he painted about his childhood home of Dermott, are now a part of the permanent collection at the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Alexander's work is mostly influenced by his experiences in life, such as growing up in the rural south during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as his life in Detroit, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s."}
{"text":"Alexander moved to Detroit, Michigan after two years of school in Pine Bluff to seek employment in his chosen field. However, he was unsuccessful in the short run, and instead, he ended up finding work in a Chrysler auto assembly plant and became fascinated with the innerworkings of cars. This led him to become a certified mechanic, a craft he worked at for the next seventeen years. He ultimately met and married his wife, Patricia while living in Detroit, and they moved their family to Irving, Texas where he opened his own auto repair shop and operated it until 1991."}
{"text":"Alexander is also a \"realist painter\" who works in a variety of other mediums including oils, acrylics, and watercolors. He is a self-taught artist who chooses mostly to do exhibits in venues that provide mainstream exposure to a large variety of people such as festivals, schools, malls, libraries, banks, art institutions, and even U.S. Post Office branches on occasion."}
{"text":"In early 1996 Alexander finished and released his popular \"Dermott Series\", a 20 piece collection of oil and acrylic paintings that offered a nostalgic look back at his childhood of growing up in rural southeast Arkansas. The paintings feature images of people, buildings, and sites of Dermott, Arkansas, such as a cotton gin, his childhood house, where he went to school, and other images. Alexander said at the time that, \"I did the Dermott Series for many personal reasons, and I'm overwhelmed by the response this collection is creating here in Texas\". The series includes, \"Birthplace\", \"Where I grew up\", \"Picking Cotton\", \"Cotton Gin\", \"Hot Grits\", \"In the kitchen with mama\", and the old Chicot County High School, among others."}
{"text":"In 1999 Alexander unveiled his \"Detroit Series\", a series of oil and acrylic paintings of various sites in Detroit, Michigan at the American Black Artist Institute on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The nine piece series includes paintings on Belle Isle Park, the Detroit skyline, the Detroit River, Hitsville USA (the original home for Motown Records), Greektown Historic District, the old Tiger Stadium (Detroit), the old J.L. Hudson building, former mayor Coleman A. Young, and many more."}
{"text":"In May 1998 Alexander unveiled his \"Delta Series, which was painted entirely with acrylics, during \"the Arkansas Schools Tours\". The tour was expanded that year to include stops in Greenville, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee. This series included paintings of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain region from Monroe, Louisiana, to Memphis. It includes a painting of Graceland, Elvis Presley's former home, the landmark Greenville Courthouse in Greenville, a perspective of Beale Street in Memphis, and his classic rendition of a \"Cotton Farm\", among other subjects. Another piece from the Delta Series, \"Aunt Eira Mae\", was donated to the permanent collection of the African American Museum (Dallas, Texas), in 2004."}
{"text":"Alexander has also donated work to art departments of schools and colleges. In October 1996 at halftime at the inaugural football game, billed as the \"Mobil Gridiron Classic\", at Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas, Alexander presented a piece from one of his series, \"The series of P.A.T.R.I.C.E\", to the president, and the chancellor, of the participating colleges, respectively, Texas Southern University and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff."}
{"text":"Alexander's most popular Pen and Ink art series, \"The Sixties Series\" has been exhibited in schools, libraries, and art institutions in several places since it was completed in 1993. It consists of elaborate drawings of well known figures and events of the 1960s, such as the civil rights Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, and portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Rosa Parks. This series also covers the Vietnam War."}
{"text":"The theme pieces in the collection are a piece called \"Composite Sixties\", and one called \"Composite Protests\", which make up a composite of people, places and events that were prominent in the 1960s. For example, they show images of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, the United States presidents who served during the sixties, also J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, an image of U.S. astronauts landing on the moon in 1969, and many of the American protests that took place during this turbulent decade, to name a few."}
{"text":"In 2001, Alexander finished his first book called \"African-American History at a Glance\", which also included several pen and ink drawings of African-Americans who have contributed substantially to the American success story. \"There is a lack of input regarding African-Americans in the American history curriculum of schools all over America\" Mr. Alexander says. \"There are a lot of schools that offer it as a choice to students, but I think it should be a part of regular American history\"."}
{"text":"Alexander's book was used to help create a supplemental text, that was later put together by the Irving Independent School District to help improve the American history curriculum in the high schools of Irving, Texas in 2002. His book deliberately ignores the contributions of African-Americans in the areas of sports and entertainment, as he feels they are already too well known and over-emphasized in society. Alexander says in his book that, \"By no means is this an attempt to downplay the prowess of these particular individuals, or to discourage other individuals who aspire to excel in those areas. This publication is intent on bringing to the forefront, some of the African-American contributions that have historically been largely ignored\"."}
{"text":"Alexander is a devout Christian who teaches Sunday school and has also served as a Church deacon. He has taught Sunday school for several years and he also teaches through his books, online \"Weekly Sunday School Lesson\" commentaries, which are based on the international Sunday school lesson system, his online Book by Book Bible Study, and, his national e-mail system."}
{"text":"He also has created a large body of artwork in Christian and biblical themes over the years, such as his paintings, \"The Twenty-third Psalm Series\", which are a visual depiction of the verses of Psalm 23 in the Holy Bible, \"Memories of St. Paul\", which is a depiction of his childhood church in Dermott, Arkansas, \"Bible Stories\", \"The Fall of Man\", a depiction of Adam and Eve after being evicted from the Garden of Eden, \"Sunday Sermon\", and many others."}
{"text":"Alexander lives in Texas with his wife Patricia. They have four children: Ken, Leandra, Kawanna, and Patrice."}
{"text":"Derrick Barnes is an American author. He is known for writing several popular series of children's books and is a former staff writer for Hallmark greeting cards. In 2018 Barnes received several awards that include the Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award for his 2017 book \"\"."}
{"text":"Barnes' books celebrate African American culture and feature positive images of black children in everyday life."}
{"text":"Barnes began his writing career in 1999 as the first full-time black male copywriter for Hallmark. In 2003, he left Hallmark and moved to New Orleans, where he worked a variety of jobs before signing a multi-book deal with children's book publisher Scholastic."}
{"text":"In 2011, Barnes began working part-time in the Kansas City Public Library's outreach department. As part of the library's \"Stories to Go\" program, Barnes was hired to travel to sites such as schools, daycares, and churches reading to children, and share stories with them."}
{"text":"In 2004, Scholastic published his books \"The Low-down, Bad-day Blues\", and \"Stop, Drop, and Chill\". Barnes' first young adult book, \"The Making of Dr. Truelove\", was published in 2008. The story, about a 16-year-old boy and his pursuit of the girl of his dreams, revolves around relationships and sexuality, and the book was ranked as one of the top 100 books for teens by the New York Public Library."}
{"text":"\"We Could Be Brothers\", a hardcover novel written for young teenagers, tells the story of two middle-grade boys with two different upbringings who both attend the same school. The book explores coming-of-age themes, including race, self-respect, women, and what it means to grow up as a black kid in American society. It was published by Scholastic in 2010. Critics praised its story line and its focus on the themes of friendship and community."}
{"text":"\"Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut\"."}
{"text":"Barnes' first picture book, \",\" illustrated by Gordon C. James, was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. The story is about a young black boy and his experience getting a haircut in a barbershop. It explores aspects of African American culture, and celebrates themes of self-confidence and pride. \"Crown\" was well received, featuring at the 2018 ALA Youth Media Awards and winning several awards including a 2018 Newbery Honor (for content), a Caldecott Honor (for illustrations), a Coretta Scott King Award (for both author and illustrator), the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award (writer and illustrator), and the $50,000 Kirkus Prize."}
{"text":"The picture book \"The King of Kindergarten\" illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton was released in July 2019."}
{"text":"Barnes' 2020 book, \"I Am Every Good Thing\", won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for young people's literature."}
{"text":"Barnes has identified Stevie Wonder and Langston Hughes as influences, saying that \"Hughes and his Simple short-story series helped him learn about dialogue and character development, while the liner notes of Wonder's albums inspired Barnes to manipulate language the way the songsmith did to add rhythm to his writing style. He recounts reading the liner notes as a seven-year-old child, enthralled by the language.\""}
{"text":"In an interview with The Kansas City Star, Barnes explained that there aren't enough books about kids of color by people of color. \"I want to leave behind a body of work my children can be proud of, but I also want to change how children see themselves in this world. I want to thwart those negative images and make sure they know they are loved.\""}
{"text":"Barnes grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, reading many picture books from a young age. Barnes graduated from Jackson State University with a degree in Marketing. Barnes, his wife Dr. Tinka Barnes, and their four sons currently reside in Charlotte, North Carolina."}
{"text":"Christian Cooper is an American science writer and editor, and also a comics writer and editor. He is based in New York City."}
{"text":"Cooper has written stories for \"Marvel Comics Presents\", which often feature characters such as \"Ghost Rider\" and \"Vengeance\". He has also edited a number of X-Men collections, and the final two issues of the \"Marvel Swimsuit Special\". Cooper is currently a senior biomedical editor at Health Science Communications."}
{"text":"Cooper was Marvel's first openly gay writer and editor. He introduced the first gay male character in \"Star Trek\", Yoshi Mishima, in the \"\" series, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in 1999. He also introduced the first openly lesbian character for Marvel, Victoria Montesi and created and authored \"Queer Nation: The Online Gay Comic\". Cooper was also an associate editor for \"Alpha Flight\" #106 in which the character Northstar came out as gay."}
{"text":"In the 1980s, he was president of the Harvard Ornithological Club, and is currently on the Board of Directors for NYC Audubon. Cooper has a long history of LGBT activism including being the co-chair of the board of directors of GLAAD in the 1980s."}
{"text":"On May 25, 2020, Cooper played a key role in the Central Park birdwatching incident, which led to the creation of Black Birders Week. The incident is also the basis for his online comic book about racism, illustrated by Alitha Martinez and published by DC Comics, called \"It's a Bird\"."}
{"text":"Jordannah Elizabeth (born October 16, 1986 in Baltimore, MD) is an American journalist, lecturer, music critic, author and screenwriter."}
{"text":"Elizabeth started her professional writing career by earning bylines in Vice Magazine, Nerve.com and Bitch Media in March 2013. In October 2013, she was brought on as a regular contributing writer and entertainment reporter for New York Amsterdam News arts and entertainment section where she has conducted high-profile interviews with African American leaders of their fields like producer, Teddy Riley, Walter Williams of The O'Jays and Black Girls Code founder, Kimberly Bryant."}
{"text":"As a national journalist, Jordannah wrote for a number of Bay Area publications in 2014 such as San Francisco Bay Guardian, East Bay Express SF Weekly and worked as the associate editor of The Deli Magazine San Francisco from 2013 to 2017. Jordannah expanded her reach as a global journalist, writing for MTV Iggy, MTV's (now defunct) world music blog and covering global Women's and Girl's Rights for Ms. Magazine."}
{"text":"From 2015 through 2018, Jordannah's work became more focused on literature, jazz criticism and global feminist reporting. Elizabeth has shared panels with esteemed journalists like Greg Tate, Lara Pellegrinelli and Michelle Mercer."}
{"text":"Her bylines have expanded to Chicago Reader, DownBeat, LA Weekly, Hearst Magazines, NPR Music, Popsugar, Cond\u00e9 Nast and other publications. Elizabeth's writing ranges from interviews, music journalism, personal essays, articles on healing in relationships and trauma to literary journalism. Her broad voice has made her an active teacher and lecturer, teaching writing and journalism workshops at institutions like Maryland Institute College of Art and Center for New Music in San Francisco. She has lectured at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, De Montfort University in Leicester, England, and was invited as a guest journalist at Harvard University's Black Lives Matter: Music, Race, and Justice Conference in February 2017. She has also moderated panels on literature and film at Baltimore Book Festival and Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD."}
{"text":"In 2020, her writing has appeared in Chamber Music Magazine, New York City Jazz Record, The ZORA Music Canon , Universal Music Group's branded content online publication, uDiscover Music and has written a COVID-19 arts & entertainment column for New York Amsterdam News entitled \"Stealth Isolation\". In August 2020, she was a participant in the inaugural Florence Price Festival as a panelist on the Race and Gender in Classical Music Criticism in panel."}
{"text":"Jordannah interviewed Emmy award winning filmmaker, Stanley Nelson Jr. for New York Amsterdam News in March of 2021. In April 2021, she was selected as a keynote speaker and panelist at the Columbia University's Music Scholarship Conference along with classical music critic, Anne Midgette and Emmy award winning video journalist, Estelle Caswell."}
{"text":"Her children's book, \"She Raised Her Voice!: 50 Black Women Who Sang Their Way into Music History\" published by Running Press Kids is due out in December 2021."}
{"text":"Jordannah's has shared commentary and made many guest appearances on radio shows and podcasts including CBC syndicated radio, BBC 2, WYPR and several podcast shows. She has appeared episodes of the Reelz Channel music docu-series, Breaking the Band and is slated to appear on the Reelz Channel\/Viacom CBS International Studios music docu-series, The Story of the Song. She has also work on projects by Bert Marcus Productions and the UK production company, RAW TV."}
{"text":"Jordannah is a recipient of the Sundance Institutes' Press Inclusive Initiative grant and received scholarships to study television writing at Sundance Co\/\/ab."}
{"text":"As a screenwriter, Jordannah has written an original pilot based on her novella series, \"The Warmest Low\" and wrote the script for an episode of the PBS Digital web series, Sound Field. She has been mentored by screenwriters and showrunners, Jessica Hinds, Diane Ruggiero, Krista Vernoff and Evette Vargas."}
{"text":"Lorraine Bethel is an African-American lesbian feminist poet and author."}
{"text":"She is a graduate of Yale University. Bethel has taught and lectured on black women's literature and black female culture at various institutions. She currently works as a freelance journalist in New York City."}
{"text":"She participated in the Combahee River Collective, an organization that was part of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The Combahee River Collective was a black feminist group founded in Boston in 1974. It fought against racial, sexual, heterosexual, racial stereotypes and class oppression."}
{"text":"In an issue of \"off our backs\", a feminist news journal, a participant recounts her experience in the 3rd World Lesbian Writers Conference on February 24, 1979 at New York City's Women's Center, in which Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith moderated one of the five workshops available. In their workshop, called \"Third World Feminist Criticism\", Bethel and Smith discussed various topics such as the definition of \"criticism\", criticism as a \"creative\" art, white feminism versus black feminism, intersectional feminism, and the unification of black lesbians."}
{"text":"Later that year, in November 1979, Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith guest-edited \"The Black Women's Issue\" of \"Conditions: Five\", a literary magazine primarily for black lesbian women. In the introduction, it is stated that the issue \"disproves the 'non-existence' of Black feminist and Black lesbian writers and challenges forever our invisibility, particularly in the feminist press.\" Bethel wrote the poem, \"What Chou Mean We, White Girl? Or, The Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence\", which was published in this issue."}
{"text":"Bethel's essay, \"\"The Infinity of Conscious Pain\": Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition\" appeared in the seminal book, \"All of the Women Are White, All of the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies.\" Identifying in this essay as a Black feminist critic, she wrote, \"...I believe there is a separate and identifiable tradition of Black women writers, simultaneously existing within and independent of the America, Afro-American, and American female literary traditions.\""}
{"text":"Reverend Horace L. Griffin is an Episcopal minister and gay man. Griffin is the author of \"Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbian and Gays in Black Churches\", which was released in October 2006."}
{"text":"Vernice Armour (born 1973) is a former United States Marine Corps officer who was the first African-American female naval aviator in the Marine Corps and the first African American female combat pilot in the U.S. Armed Forces. She flew the AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopter in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and eventually served two tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom."}
{"text":"Armour was born in 1973 in Chicago, Illinois to Gaston Armour Jr. and Authurine Armour. After her parents divorced, Clarence Jackson married Authurine. Both her father and her stepfather had served in the military - Gaston Armour was a retired major in the U.S. Army Reserve, and Clarence Jackson was a former Marine Corps sergeant that served three tours in Vietnam."}
{"text":"Her grandfather was a Montford Point Marine, the first African Americans to integrate the Marine Corps between 1942 and 1949."}
{"text":"Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Armour graduated from Overton High School, where she was a member of the mathematics honor society, the National Honor Society, and class vice-president."}
{"text":"In 1993, while a student at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), Armour enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve and later entered into the U.S. Army's ROTC."}
{"text":"In 1996, she took time off from college to become a Nashville police officer (her childhood dream). She became the first female African-American on the motorcycle squad."}
{"text":"Armour graduated from MTSU in 1997. In 1998, Armour became the first African American female to serve as a police officer in Tempe, Arizona before joining the U.S. Marines as an Officer Candidate in October 1998."}
{"text":"Commissioned a second lieutenant on December 12, 1998 Armour was sent to flight school at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas and later Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. Earning her wings in July 2001, Armour was not only number one in her class of twelve, she was number one among the last two hundred graduates. She became the Marine Corps' first African-American female pilot."}
{"text":"After flight school, Armour was assigned to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California for training in the AH-1W SuperCobra. While at Camp Pendleton, she was named 2001 Camp Pendleton Female Athlete of the Year, twice won the Camp's annual Strongest Warrior Competition, and was a running back for the San Diego Sunfire women's football team."}
{"text":"In March 2003, she flew with HMLA-169 during the invasion of Iraq becoming America's first African-American female combat pilot. She completed two combat tours in the Gulf. Afterwards, she was assigned to the Manpower and Reserve Affairs Equal Opportunity Branch as program liaison officer."}
{"text":"Leaving the U.S. Marine Corps in June 2007, Armour began a career as a professional speaker and expert on creating breakthroughs in life."}
{"text":"In 2011, her book \"Zero to Breakthrough: The 7-Step, Battle-Tested Method for Accomplishing Goals that Matter\" was published."}
{"text":"Robert A. George is an editorial writer for the \"New York Daily News\" (and formerly for the \"New York Post\") and a conservative\/libertarian blogger and pundit. He was born in Trinidad and lived in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. A 1985 graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, George worked for the Republican National Committee and, following the 1994 midterm elections, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich."}
{"text":"In an article for the New York Daily News, January 31, 2018, he wrote these autobiographical comments regarding his work for the GOP:"}
{"text":"Nearly 30 years ago, a recent college graduate noticed that it was a presidential election year. He had always been interested in politics, and, while his ideological compass was all over the map, wouldn't it be interesting to see the process upclose? How about attending a political convention. Heck, let's be really crazy\/dumb, why not try going to both conventions, see everything really intimately, interact with politically aware folks of my own age, learn from them?"}
{"text":"Well, if a youngish black immigrant with few connections \u2014 and less experience \u2014 in politics, what does he do? Well, he realized, he did have some connections."}
{"text":"On the one hand, a professor \u2014 or tutor, as faculty at his alma mater, St. John's College in Annapolis, are called \u2014 was married to a member of a prominent Democratic family. He asked the tutor if he could inquire with his wife about any possible volunteer positions at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The tutor said he'd look into it."}
{"text":"And, a few months before, the graduate had befriended a couple who had just moved in next door. The husband was the fund-raising director at the Republican National Committee. The graduate asked his neighbor about volunteering for the '88 GOP convention in New Orleans."}
{"text":"After allowing a reasonable amount of time to pass, the graduate circled back. The GOP neighbor said, \"Yes, we'd love to have you!\" Conversely, the tutor said his wife had said, alas, that the DNC volunteer slots were assigned months before and, well ... sorry."}
{"text":"Who knows? Many years later, that graduate may still have become an editorial writer for two metropolitan newspapers, but the road would likely have been vastly different if Kathleen Kennedy Townsend \u2014 aunt to Joe Kennedy III \u2014 had managed to find a volunteer spot at the 1988 Democratic National Convention."}
{"text":"In addition to his newspaper work, George also has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and regularly appears on other political affairs programs. George has written for the conservative \"National Review,\" the libertarian \"Reason\" and the liberal \"Huffington Post.\" He also sponsors his own group political\/cultural blog, Ragged Thots. In addition, George occasionally moonlights as a stand-up comic and improviser."}
{"text":"George was one of the first conservatives to call for the resignation of Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader following comments made by Lott at the birthday party of retiring Senator Strom Thurmond."}
{"text":"George has not written for \"National Review\" since publishing an article in \"The New Republic\" that he could not vote for the re-election of George W Bush. He instead voted for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and said he voted in 2000 for Harry Browne."}
{"text":"George shares a name with a well known Princeton University professor and ethicist. Because they often wrote for the same publications, it became standard to refer to George as Robert A. George and to the Princeton professor as Robert P. George."}
{"text":"Linda Beatrice Brown is an American author and educator. She was born in Akron, Ohio, and went to college in North Carolina at Bennett College. While in North Carolina, she won several awards for her writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Brown has published many books, including \"Belles of Liberty\", \"Black Angels\", \"Crossing Over Jordan\" and \"The Long Walk\". The genres and styles of writing in which she wrote include fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and poetry. Many of her works are centered on the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles that can be rooted back to slavery during the time of the American Civil War."}
{"text":"Brown was born in Ohio, the daughter of Raymond R. Brown and Edith Player Brown. She moved to North Carolina to pursue her education at the collegiate level. She attended Bennett College, while her aunt Willa Beatrice Player was the president, and majored in English and French. She graduated as the valedictorian of her graduating class at Bennett. After undergrad, she attended graduate school at Case Western Reserve University where she got her master's degree. Moving back to Ohio, she received her PhD in African American Literature and Creative Writing from Union Institute and University."}
{"text":"Brown has been an educator at schools and universities including Kent State University, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and finally Guilford College. Presently, she is the Willa B. Player Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Bennett College for Women. She teaches African American literature there."}
{"text":"Brown has received awards during her time in North Carolina. These include 2nd place in the Creative Writing Contest at her college, 1st place in fiction writing from the NC Coalition of the Arts and a residency at the Headlands Center."}
{"text":"The Lady Chablis (March 11, 1957 \u2013 September 8, 2016), also known as The Grand Empress and The Doll, was an American actor, author, and transgender club performer. Through exposure in the bestselling nonfiction book \"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\", and its 1997 film adaptation, she became one of the first trans performers to be introduced to a wide audience."}
{"text":"Chablis' mother moved back to Florida and practiced nursing at Sunnyland Hospital in Tallahassee. She lived with her mother and her new husband, who owned a dry-cleaning business. Chablis became close to her neighbor, Connie, who offered her a lot of support and a refuge from homophobic troubles at home."}
{"text":"Chablis began her career at age 15 in the Fox Trot gay bar in Tallahassee. It was there that she met Cliff Taylor, who performed under the pseudonym of Miss Tina Devore. He was the first male in Quincy that Chablis ever met who dressed up. Taylor offered to have Chablis stay with him if she ever moved to Atlanta. She moved there in 1974 at the age of 17, previously living with her aunt in Tallahassee for about eighteen months."}
{"text":"She began working at the Prince George Inn, a gay-owned restaurant, where she began a relationship with one of her co-workers. She left in 1975 after the relationship ended, and picked up work at Eckerd's Drugstore. After becoming sick for three weeks, she had to leave that position too. A new friend, Linda, saw the decline in Chablis' health and moved her into her two-bedroom apartment. She found another job, this time at a Burlington Coat Factory outlet."}
{"text":"Chablis and Linda moved to Regency Woods apartment complex. Encouraged by her friend's lush life and surroundings, Chablis decided to return to the stage. She eventually found herself at The Locker Room, a bathhouse."}
{"text":"In the late 1980s, a job offer from The Friends Lounge, a cabaret bar in Savannah, Georgia, resulted in her moving south from Atlanta."}
{"text":"She performed at Club One on its opening night in 1988, and was a regular performer there until August 6, 2016, just before she was hospitalized."}
{"text":"In the early 1990s, she moved with her partner, Jesse, to Columbia, South Carolina, where she began working at a new spot, The Menage. The Menage closed after three years, due to new competition, and Chablis did not find much work for a couple of years."}
{"text":"Chablis returned to Savannah, beginning work at new club, The Edge."}
{"text":"She was a prominent character in John Berendt's best-selling 1994 book \"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\", during her days working at The Pickup on Congress Street. She left her job in a dispute over pay."}
{"text":"Chablis frequently performed at her \"home\" nightclub of Club One, where she was known as the \"Grand Empress\". Chablis traveled the U.S. performing her show, \"The Doll Revue\", at various venues and special events, such as gay pride gatherings. She also appeared on radio shows."}
{"text":"Chablis' autobiography \"Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah\" was published in 1996, a year before she played herself in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie adaptation of \"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\", starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack."}
{"text":"The Lady Chablis was featured in the closing segment of the Savannah episode of \"Bizarre Foods America\" on The Travel Channel. She joined host Andrew Zimmern at several Savannah restaurants including Elizabeth on 37th. In 2012, she was interviewed in Savannah on the local television and internet talk show \"MAMA Knows Best\" (season 2, episode 1). On April 19, 2013 Chablis performed for the grand opening of the short-lived Mama's Cabaret in Lewiston, Maine, with \"MAMA\" Savannah Georgia."}
{"text":"In her early career as an entertainer, under the name Brenda Dale Knox, she won multiple titles in drag pageantry including:"}
{"text":"Chablis said she did not want any label except her name, \"The Lady Chablis\", and said she found it hurtful when people called her a \"drag queen\". In his book, Berendt wrote that he met Chablis as she was returning home from having a hormone injection. In her book \"Hiding My Candy\", Chablis said she had not undergone sex reassignment surgery."}
{"text":"The Lady Chablis died on September 8, 2016, from \"Pneumocystis\" pneumonia, aged 59, at Savannah's Candler Hospital."}
{"text":"On November 5, a special screening of \"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil\" was shown at Savannah's Lucas Theatre for the Arts, with a tribute to Chablis beforehand. A few of Chablis' gowns were on display in the theatre's lobby. Jerry Spence, the former hairdresser who appeared in both the book and movie, was in attendance. A reception was held at Club One after the memorial service and, after the movie screening, Club One Cabaret held two Lady Chablis tribute shows."}
{"text":"Upon news of her death, several of Chablis' former co-stars made tributes to her. Paul Hipp, whom she appeared alongside in the movie adaptation of \"Midnight in the Garden\", said: \"So sad to hear of The Lady Chablis' passing. She was super talented, kind, and laugh out loud funny. She was a true transgender pioneer, way ahead of her time (in the Deep South, no less). This pic of The Lady and me was taken between shots while filming \"Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil\". Feel free to envy our glamour.\""}
{"text":"John Mason Brewer (March 24, 1896 \u2013 1975) was an American folklorist, scholar, and writer noted for his work on African-American folklore in Texas. He studied at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and Indiana University, while he taught at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Texas Southern University in Houston, Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas (now Texas A&M University\u2013Commerce). He published numerous collections of folklore and poetry, most notably \"The Word on the Brazos\" (1953), \"Aunt Dicey Tales\" (1956), \"Dog Ghosts and Other Texas Negro Folk Tales\" (1958), and \"Worser Days and Better Times\" (1965)."}
{"text":"Brewer was the first African American to be an active member of the Texas Folklore Society, to be a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and to serve on the council of the American Folklore Society. He was also the first African American to deliver a lecture series at the University of Arizona, the University of California, and the University of Colorado, and he broke the color barrier at Austin's Driskill Hotel. He has been compared to Zora Neale Hurston, Joel Chandler Harris, and Alain Locke. He also published a book on African American legislators in Texas during the Reconstruction era up until their disenfranchisement."}
{"text":"In 1932, while in Austin, Brewer met J. Frank Dobie, then the secretary and editor of the Texas Folklore Society. According to Byrd, Dobie was the \"biggest influence on [Brewer's] career as a writer\". Also in 1932, the Society published a collection of African-American folktales collected by Brewer that was entitled \"Juneteenth\". He studied folklore formally for the first time at Indiana University, under the direction of Stith Thompson, ultimately earning his Master of Arts degree there in 1933. That same year, he published \"Negrito: Negro Dialect Poems of the Southwest\". In 1936, he wrote \"The Negro in Texas History\" for the occasion of the Texas Centennial."}
{"text":"Brewer began his tenure as a professor of English at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1959. After moving to North Carolina, Brewer's most significant publications were the articles \"Animal Tales as Told by African Students of Livingstone College\" and \"North Carolina Negro Oral Narratives\" (both published in the journal \"North Carolina Folklore\") and two books, \"Three Looks and Some Peeps\" (1963) and \"Worser Days and Better Times\" (1965)."}
{"text":"Brewer was a Methodist and a member of the Democratic Party. He married twice, and had a son with his first wife; his second wife, Ruth Helen, was from Hitchcock, Texas. After his death, he was buried in Austin."}
{"text":"Brewer was the first African American to be an active member of the Texas Folklore Society, to be a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and to serve on the council of the American Folklore Society, where he rose to the position of vice-president. He was also the first African American to deliver a lecture series at the University of Arizona, the University of California, and the University of Colorado. Additionally, he broke the color barrier at Austin's Driskill Hotel when he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters."}
{"text":"A 1969 interview with Brewer is featured in the Oral History Collection at Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection. In 1997, Brewer was posthumously given the \"Compa\u00f1ero\/a de las Americas\" award by the American Folklore Society for his \"outstanding contributions to the further understanding of folk traditions in the Americas and the Caribbean\" at the same ceremony at which his friend Am\u00e9rico Paredes was likewise honored. In 1999, the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center held an exhibition on \"Aunt Dicy Tales\" that prominently featured the illustrations created by John Biggers. In January 2017, Texas A&M University\u2013Commerce held a J. Mason Brewer Day featuring Brewer scholars Bruce Glasrud and Milton Jordan as well as a panel discussion involving his former colleagues and students."}
{"text":"Brewer described his tales in \"Dog Ghosts\" in his own words as \"as varied as the Texas landscape, as full of contrasts as Texas weather. Among them are tales that have their roots deeply embedded in African, Irish, and Welsh mythology; other have parallels in pre-Columbian Mexican traditions; and a few have versions that can be traced back to Chaucer's England.\""}
{"text":"Clay Cane is a journalist, author, television commentator, radio host and filmmaker. He is the director and creator of the documentary \"Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church\", which was nominated for a 2016 GLAAD Media Award. He is the author of \"Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race\", which was released June 2017. Cane is also the host of \"The Clay Cane Show\" on SiriusXM Urban View channel 126."}
{"text":"A graduate from Rutgers University, Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in English and African-American Studies, Cane's commentary is heard on MTV, HLN, MSNBC, FOX, VH1, CNN and numerous other television programs, including \"The O'Reilly Factor\", \"Don Lemon Tonight\" and \"Melissa Harris-Perry\". He has contributed to print and online publications including CNN.com, The Washington Post and Gawker."}
{"text":"Cane was the host of \"Clay Cane Live\", a weekly, call in and political radio talk show on WWRL 1600AM, which was home to radio programs for Reverend Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz. After 86 years, the station aired its final broadcast in December 2013. In November 2017, Cane returned to radio on SiriusXM Urban View channel 126 for \"The Clay Cane Show\"."}
{"text":"He is a member of New York Film Critics Online and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association."}
{"text":"Cane is the author of \"Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race.\" The book was published via Cleis Press in June 2017. Publishers Weekly called the book, \"Cane\u2019s observations on the intersections of class and race, which do not shy away from the quagmire of being poor in America, resonate in today\u2019s fraught political climate. Even when he addresses painful issues such as domestic violence, sexual exploitation, food insecurity, and inadequate mental health care, he retains humor and compassion.\""}
{"text":"Lucy Ann Delaney, born Lucy Berry (c. 1830 \u2013 after 1891), was an African-American author, and activist, a former slave notable for her 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. This is the only first-person account of a \"freedom suit\" and one of the few slave narratives published in the post-Emancipation period."}
{"text":"The memoir recounts her mother Polly Berry's legal battles in St. Louis, Missouri, for her own and her daughter's freedom from slavery.For her daughter's case, Berry attracted the support of Edward Bates, a prominent Whig politician and judge, and the future US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. He argued the case of Lucy Ann Berry in court and won in February 1844. Their cases were two of 301 freedom suits filed in St. Louis from 1814 to 1860. Discovered in the late twentieth century, the case files are held by the Missouri Historical Society and are searchable online."}
{"text":"For decades little was known of Lucy Ann Delaney beyond her memoir. In the 1990s her mother's and her freedom suits were among the brief case files found for 301 freedom suits in St. Louis, dating from 1814\u20131860. Related material is available online in a searchable database created by the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Project, in collaboration with Washington University. In addition, scholars have conducted research into censuses and other historic material related to Delaney's memoir to document the facts."}
{"text":"Born into slavery in St. Louis, Missouri in 1830, Lucy Ann Berry was the second daughter of slaves Polly Berry (born Polly Crocket) and a mulatto father whose name she did not note. Their first daughter was named Nancy. Berry's family was held by Major Taylor Berry and his wife, Frances. Lucy's mother had been born free in Illinois (a free state), but was kidnapped as a child by slave catchers and sold into slavery in Missouri."}
{"text":"In her freedom suit, Polly Berry deposed that she was held as a slave in Wayne County, Kentucky by Joseph Crockett, and was brought by him to Illinois. There they stayed for several weeks while he hired her out for domestic work. As Illinois was a free state, he was supposed to lose his right to hold slave property by staying there, and Polly could have been freed. It was on this basis that she was later awarded freedom, as witnesses were found to testify as to her having been held illegally as a slave in Illinois."}
{"text":"The major told Polly and her husband that they and his other slaves would be freed upon his death and the death of his wife. After the major died in a duel, the widow Fanny Berry married Robert Wash, a lawyer later appointed as a Missouri State Supreme Court judge. When Fanny Wash died, the Berry slave family's fortunes changed. Judge Wash sold Lucy Ann's father to a plantation down the Mississippi River in the Deep South."}
{"text":"Polly Berry became concerned for the safety of her daughters, and determined they should escape. Lucy Ann's older sister Nancy slipped away while traveling with a daughter of the family, Mary Berry Cox, and her new husband on their honeymoon in the North. Nancy left them at Niagara Falls, took the ferry across the river, and safely reached Canada and a friend of her mother's."}
{"text":"After having conflict with Mary Cox in 1839, Polly Berry was sold to Joseph A. Magehan, but escaped about three weeks later. She reached Chicago, but was captured by slave catchers. They returned her to Magehan and slavery in St. Louis."}
{"text":"On returning, Polly Berry (also known as Polly Wash after her previous master) sued for her freedom in the Circuit Court in the case known as \"Polly Wash v. Joseph A. Magehan\" in October 1839. When her suit was finally heard in 1843, her attorney Harris Sproat convinced a jury of her free birth and kidnapping as a child. Wash was freed. She remained in St. Louis to continue her separate effort to secure her daughter Lucy Ann Berry's freedom, for which she had filed suit in 1842, shortly after Berry fled her master."}
{"text":"In 1845, Lucy Ann met and married steamboat worker Frederick Turner, with whom she settled in Quincy, Illinois. Her mother lived with them. Turner died soon after in a boiler explosion on the steamboat \"The Edward Bates\". (It was named for the lawyer who had helped secure Lucy Ann's freedom two years before.)"}
{"text":"Polly Wash and Lucy Ann returned to St. Louis. In 1849, Lucy Ann met and married Zachariah Delaney. They were married for the rest of their lives, and her mother lived with them. Though the couple had four children, two did not survive infancy. The remaining son and daughter both died in their early twenties."}
{"text":"In the late nineteenth century, many blacks migrated to St. Louis from the Deep South for its industrial jobs. Delaney met with new arrivals to try to track down her father. Learning that he was living on a plantation 15 miles south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, she wrote and asked him to visit her. Her sister Nancy from Canada joined their reunion in St. Louis. Their father was glad to see them, but, as his wife Polly had died by then, he returned to Mississippi and his friends of 45 years."}
{"text":"She died in her Missouri home August 31, 1910. Funeral services were held for her in St. Louis, sponsored by the Heroines of Jericho."}
{"text":"By 1842, Lucy Ann was working for Martha Berry Mitchell, another of the married Berry daughters. They came into conflict in part because of the slave girl's inexperience at heavy domestic tasks, including laundry. Martha decided to sell her, and her husband David D. Mitchell arranged the sale. The day before she was to leave, Lucy Ann escaped and hid at the house of a friend of her mother's."}
{"text":"Since her own case had not been settled, Wash was still considered a slave with no legal standing, but under the slave law, she could file suit in Circuit Court in St. Louis for Lucy Ann Berry's freedom as \"next friend\". The law provided a slave with the status of a \"poor person\", with court-appointed counsel when the court determined the case had grounds. Delaney's memoir suggests that her mother's attorneys suggested her strategy of filing separate suits for her and her daughter, to prevent a jury's worrying about taking too much property from one slaveholder."}
{"text":"The case was prepared primarily by Francis Butter Murdoch, who litigated nearly one third of the freedom suits filed in St. Louis from 1840\u20131847. Francis B. Murdoch had served as the Alton, Illinois district attorney, and prosecuted the murder of the printer Elijah Lovejoy by anti-abolitionists. Wash also attracted the support of Edward Bates; a prominent Whig politician and judge, he argued Lucy Ann's case in court. Bates later served as the US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln."}
{"text":"Lucy Ann and Polly Berry lived in St. Louis after gaining her freedom. They had to get certificates as free blacks and deal with other restrictions of the time against free people of color. They worked together as seamstresses."}
{"text":"As Delaney recounted in her memoir, she became active in civic and religious associations. Such organizations developed rapidly in both the African-American and white communities nationally in the years following the Civil War. She joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1855, founded in 1816 in Philadelphia as the first independent black denomination in the US. In addition, Delaney was elected president of the first colored society, the Female Union, an organization of African-American women. She also served as president of the Daughters of Zion, as well as a women's group affiliated with the Freemasons, to which her husband belonged.They often supported community education and health projects."}
{"text":"Delaney belonged to the Col. Shaw Woman's Relief Corps, No. 34, a women's auxiliary to the Col. Shaw Post, 343, Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The veterans' group was named after the white commanding officer of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first of the United States Colored Troops and a unit that achieved renown for courage in the Civil War. Delaney dedicated her memoir to the GAR, which had fought for the freedom of slaves."}
{"text":"In 1891, Delaney published her \"From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom,\" the only first-person account of a freedom suit. The text is also classified as a slave narrative, most of which were published prior to the Civil War and Emancipation. Delaney devoted most of her account to her mother Polly Berry's struggles to free her family from slavery. Though the story is Delaney's, she features her mother as the lead protagonist."}
{"text":"The narrative is steeped in spirituality, as was typical of the genre and people's lives. Delaney delebrated what she considered God's benevolent role in her own life, and she attacked the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners. \"From the Darkness\" emphasizes the strength of the African Americans who suffered under slavery, rather than recount its abuses. By continuing her memoir after she gained freedom at age 14, Delaney could demonstrate her fortitude as a young widow, and after the deaths of each of her four children. She portrayed her mother Polly Berry as serving as an adviser and role model. By celebrating her political and civic activities, Delaney stated the way African Americans fully participated in US democracy."}
{"text":"\"From the Darkness\" was originally published in St. Louis in 1891 by J.T. Smith. After the rise of the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement and feminism, and new interest in historic black and women's literature, in 1988 the book was reprinted in the collection \"Six Women's Slave Narratives\" by Oxford University Press. It is available in full for free online by Project Gutenberg, as well as by the University of North Carolina in its \"Documents of the American South\" website ."}
{"text":"Literary critic P. Gabrielle Foreman suggested that author Frances Harper based her character of \"Lucille Delaney\", in the novel \"Iola Leroy\" (1892), on Delaney's memoir published the year before."}
{"text":"The city of St. Louis has frequently acknowledged Lucy Ann Berry's significance to local and national Black History."}
{"text":"1900 United States Census, Missouri St. Louis ED 396 Precinct 11 St. Louis city Ward 26"}
{"text":"Zach Delaney Male 77 Married Black, B. Feb 1823 Ohio, Married 1850, Father born Virginia, Mother born Virginia, Head of Household, Employed as Janitor"}
{"text":"Lucy A Delaney Female 74 Married Black, B. May 1826 Missouri, Married 1850, Father born Kentucky, Mother born Illinois, Mother of 7 children total"}
{"text":"Ancestry City Directories 1822-1995, Zachariah resides in St. Louis occupation as Cook, Porter or Janitor"}
{"text":"Last entry in St. Louis City Directory was on page 257 for 1904, Zachariah Delaney, Janitor resides at 1317 Washington. Approx death date of 1904-5"}
{"text":"Boiler Explosion and Fire of the Edward Bates where Lucy's first husband Frederick Turner perished as a deckhand. Listed among those Mortally wounded, dying of his injuries with one William Robinson, presumed a co worker. *Note a Claudine and Louisa Robinson lived next door to the Delaneys on the 1900 census for St. Louis. Eli Delany, First Cook, listed among dead crewmen"}
{"text":"\"...Missing and Dead of the Crew -- JOHN BROWN, colored fireman, Quincy, blown overboard; ANDREW HATFIELD, colored fireman, Ill., do.; ELI DELANY, first cook, St. Louis, do.; GEO. MATSON, fireman, do., do.; JOHN LEMON, deck-hand, do. do., HARRY JOHNSON, do. do.; WM. PARKS, do. do.; C. W. LYONS, do. do.; Quincy, do.; ______ HOLLIDAY, do. do.; WM. AMNET, do., St. Louis, died of wounds; FRED., (Frenchman) cook, do. do.; ISAAC DOZIER, deck-hand, Ala., do. Four missing names not known."}
{"text":"Newspaper clipping states 'dead were buried at Hamburg, Illinois\""}
{"text":"Wounded\u2014George Blackwell, T. B. Ewing, D. E. Cameron, Samuel Simpson, Preston Leiper, Le Roy Jenkins, E. B. Morrison and wife, (badly,) M. Vansel, James Cook, J. H. Simpson, Master Bowen, Mr. Eades, E. T. Hudson, H. M. Swazy, J. Righter, and friend. Mortally Wounded\u2014George Watt, Samuel Dolsey, Wm. Wells, John Montague, Silas Bowman, Samuel Ferguson, T. M. McDonald, Joseph Morrison, Jacob Andrews, F. Turner, Jno. Swan, and Wm. Robinson."}
{"text":"Sarah Louise \"Sadie\" Delany (September 19, 1889 \u2013 January 25, 1999) was an American educator and civil rights pioneer who was the subject, along with her younger sister, Elizabeth \"Bessie\" Delany, of the \"New York Times\" bestselling oral history biography, \"\", by journalist Amy Hill Hearth. Sadie was the first African-American permitted to teach domestic science at the high-school level in the New York public schools, and became famous, with the publication of the book, at the age of 103."}
{"text":"Delany was the second-eldest of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany (1858\u20131928), the first black person elected Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Nanny Logan Delany (1861\u20131956), an educator. Rev. Delany was born into slavery in St. Mary's, Georgia. Nanny Logan Delany was born in a community then known as Yak, Virginia, seven miles from Danville."}
{"text":"Sadie Delany was born in what was then known as Lynch Station, Virginia, at the home of her mother's sister, Eliza Logan. She was raised on the campus of St. Augustine's School (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her father was the Vice-Principal and her mother a teacher and administrator. Delany was a 1910 graduate of the school. In 1916, she moved to New York City, where she attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then transferred to Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1920 and a master's of education in 1925. She was a New York City schoolteacher until her retirement in 1960. She was the first black person permitted to teach domestic science on the high school level in New York City."}
{"text":"Delany died at the age of 109 in Mount Vernon, New York, where she resided in the final decades of her life. She is interred at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina."}
{"text":"In 1994, the sisters and Hearth published \"The Delany Sisters' Book of Everyday Wisdom,\" a follow-up to \"Having Our Say.\" After Bessie's death in 1995 at age 104, Sadie Delany and Hearth created a third book, \"On My Own At 107: Reflections on Life Without Bessie.\""}
{"text":"Delany was the aunt of science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany Jr., the son of her youngest brother. Living Relative Families:"}
{"text":"Ryan N. Dennis is an American curator and writer who is currently Chief Curator and Artistic Director at the Mississippi Museum of Art's Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE). She previously served as Curator and Programs Director (2017-2020) and Public Art Director and Curator (2012-2017) at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. Dennis focuses on African American contemporary art with an emphasis on site-specific projects and community engagement."}
{"text":"Ryan N. Dennis was born in Houston, Texas. In 2007, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Houston where she was in the African American studies program and the art history program. She received a M.A. degree in arts and cultural management from the Pratt Institute in New York City in 2011. Dennis interned in the curatorial department of the Menil Collection in Houston, where she would later work professionally."}
{"text":"Early in her career, Ryan N. Dennis worked as a curatorial assistant at the Menil Collection (2007-2009). She moved to New York City to pursue her degree, where she was a fellow at The Laundromat Project in 2009, worked in public programs at the New Museum, and was traveling exhibition and artists-in-residence manager at the Museum for African Art (now The Africa Center) from 2010 to 2012."}
{"text":"Dennis was selected for the 2019 Center for Curatorial Leadership annual Fellowship, where she completed a weeklong residency at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2019, she was selected, along with Evan Garza, to co-curate the seventh edition (2021) of the Texas Biennial, a \"geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas.\" She was a juror for the 2019 Whitney Museum of American Art Bucksbaum Award, which every two years awards $100,000 and is one of the largest cash awards for individual visual artists."}
{"text":"In April 2020, she became the Chief Curator and Artistic Director at the Mississippi Museum of Art's Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE). It is the largest art museum in the state."}
{"text":"Ryan N. Dennis' written works appear in \"Prospect.3 Notes for Now\" (2014) as part of Prospect New Orleans, \"\" (2015)\",\" the \"Miami Rail\" (2017). She also contributed to the monograph of Autumn Knight published in 2018."}
{"text":"George Cain (October 27, 1943 \u2013 October 23, 2010) was an African-American author who is renowned for writing \"Blueschild Baby\", a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1970. The book is about the life of a drug user who finally overcomes his addiction. Cain was himself a drug user but, unlike the character in his novel, he never overcame his addiction nor went on to write another book."}
{"text":"Born on October 27, 1943, as George Maurice Hopkins, he would adopt the pen name Africa Cain, later choosing to use his original first name. He grew up in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan and moved with his family to Teaneck, New Jersey after graduating from the McBurney School, which he attended on scholarship. His basketball skills earned him a scholarship at Iona College, but he dropped out as a junior and headed to the American Southwest. While in Mexico he was charged and sentenced to six months in jail for possession of marijuana."}
{"text":"Despite favorable responses to the book, he never completed a planned sequel to his debut book and as described by his ex-wife Jo Lynne Pool he \"had a lot of friends from the street, and they were going down\", and he went down along with them, his life and family falling apart."}
{"text":"Cain died at the age of 66 on October 23, 2010, in Manhattan due to complications of kidney disease. He was survived by two daughters, a son and five grandchildren."}
{"text":"Barbara Taylor Bowman (born October 30, 1928) is an American early childhood education expert\/advocate, professor, and author. Her areas of expertise include early childhood care\/education, educational equity for minority and low-income children, as well as intergenerational family support and roles. She has served on several boards and was the co-founder of Erikson Institute, where she pioneered the teaching of early childhood education and administration."}
{"text":"Bowman was born and raised on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Laura Dorothy Vaughn (n\u00e9e Jennings) and Robert Rochon Taylor, who was on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority. Her grandfather was architect Robert Robinson Taylor. Her parents were African-American. After receiving a B.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College, she began teaching at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools' nursery school, while simultaneously earning her M.A. degree in education from the University of Chicago in 1952."}
{"text":"Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and the 1965 creation of Head Start inspired Bowman. The next year, with the support of businessman and philanthropist Irving B. Harris, Bowman cofounded the"}
{"text":"Chicago School for Early Childhood Education (now known as the Erikson Institute) with child psychologist Maria Piers and social worker Lorraine Wallach. Bowman went on to serve as its president during the period of 1994 to 2001, and maintains a professorship at the institute, where she is the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development. The institute's Barbara T. Bowman Professor of Child Development professorship is named in her honor."}
{"text":"Bowman is the Chicago Public Schools' Chief Early Childhood Education Officer. She is the past president (1980\u20131982) of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Her Board memberships are many including: Business People in the Public Interest, Chicago Public Library Foundation, Great Books Foundation, High Scope Educational Foundation, Institute for Psychoanalysis, and National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Among the many honorary degrees awarded to Bowman are those from Bank Street College, Dominican University, Governors State University, Roosevelt University, and Wheelock College. During her career, she has also served on the Editorial Board of \"Early Childhood Research Quarterly\", and chaired the National Academy of Science, National Research Council's Committee on Early Childhood Pedagogy."}
{"text":"Bowman was married to the late James E. Bowman, renowned pathologist and geneticist of African American descent, and the first black resident at St. Luke's Hospital. They have one daughter, Valerie Jarrett, who was Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison in the Obama administration. Their granddaughter, Laura Jarrett, graduated from Harvard Law School in 2010 and married Tony Balkissoon, who is also a lawyer and the son of Ontario MP Bas Balkissoon, in June 2012."}
{"text":"Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 \u2013 May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party."}
{"text":"In 1968, Cleaver wrote \"Soul on Ice\", a collection of essays that, at the time of its publication, was praised by \"The New York Times Book Review\" as \"brilliant and revealing\". Cleaver stated in \"Soul on Ice\": \"If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.\""}
{"text":"Cleaver went on to become a prominent member of the Black Panthers, having the titles Minister of Information and Head of the International Section of the Panthers, while a fugitive from the United States criminal justice system in Cuba and Algeria. He became a fugitive after leading an ambush on Oakland police officers, during which two officers were wounded. Cleaver was also wounded during the clash and Black Panther member Bobby Hutton was killed. As editor of the official Panthers' newspaper, \"The Black Panther\", Cleaver's influence on the direction of the Party was rivaled only by founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Cleaver and Newton eventually fell out with each other, resulting in a split that weakened the party."}
{"text":"After spending seven years in exile in Cuba, Algeria, and France, Cleaver returned to the US in 1975, where he became involved in various religious groups (Unification Church and CARP) before finally joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as becoming a conservative Republican, appearing at Republican events."}
{"text":"Eldridge Cleaver was born in Wabbaseka, Arkansas; as a child he moved with his large family to Phoenix and then to Los Angeles. He was the son of Leroy Cleaver and Thelma Hattie Robinson. He had four siblings: Wilhelima Marie, Helen Grace, James Weldon, and Theophilus Henry."}
{"text":"Cleaver was released from prison on December 12, 1966. He was writing for \"Ramparts\" magazine and organizing efforts to revitalize the Organization of Afro-American Unity. The Black Panther Party was only two months old. He then joined the Oakland-based Black Panther Party (BPP), serving as Minister of Information, or spokesperson. What initially attracted Cleaver to the Panthers, as opposed to other prominent groups, was their commitment to armed struggle."}
{"text":"In 1967, Cleaver, along with Marvin X, Ed Bullins, and Ethna Wyatt, formed the Black House political\/cultural center in San Francisco. Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Sarah Webster Fabio, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Avotcja, Reginald Lockett, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier, Bobby Hutton, Huey Newton, and Bobby Seale were Black House regulars. The same year, he married Kathleen Neal Cleaver (divorced 1987), with whom he would have son Ahmad Maceo Eldridge (born 1969, Algeria; died 2018, Saudi Arabia) and daughter Joju Younghi (born July 31, 1970, North Korea)."}
{"text":"Cleaver was a presidential candidate in 1968 on the ticket of the Peace and Freedom Party. Having been born on August 31, 1935, Cleaver would not have been the requisite 35 years of age until more than a year after Inauguration Day 1969. (Although the Constitution requires that the President be at least 35 years of age, it does not specify whether he need have reached that age at the time of nomination, or election, or inauguration.) Courts in both Hawaii and New York held that he could be excluded from the ballot because he could not possibly meet the Constitutional criteria. Cleaver and his running mate Judith Mage received 36,571 votes (0.05%)."}
{"text":"Cleaver also cultivated an alliance with North Korea in 1969, and BPP publications began reprinting excerpts from Kim Il Sung's writings. Although leftists of the time often looked to Cuba, China, and North Vietnam for inspiration, few had paid any attention to the secretive Pyongyang regime. Bypassing US travel restrictions on North Korea, Cleaver and other BPP members made two visits to the country in 1969\u20131970 with the idea that the \"juche\" model could be adapted to the revolutionary liberation of African-Americans. Taken on an official tour of North Korea, Cleaver expressed admiration at \"the DPRK's stable, crime-free society which provided guaranteed food, employment, and housing for all, and which had no economic or social inequalities\"."}
{"text":"Byron Vaughn Booth (former Panther Deputy Minister of Defense) claimed that, after a trip to the DPRK, Cleaver discovered his wife had been having an affair with Clinton Robert Smith Jr. Booth told the FBI he had witnessed Cleaver shoot and kill Smith with an AK47. Elaine Mokhtefi, in the \"London Review of Books\", writes that Cleaver confessed the murder to her shortly after committing it."}
{"text":"In his 1978 book \"Soul on Fire\", Cleaver made several claims regarding his exile in Algeria, including that he was supported by regular stipends from the government of North Vietnam, which the United States was then bombing. Cleaver stated that he was followed by other former criminals turned revolutionaries, many of whom (including Booth and Smith) hijacked planes to get to Algeria."}
{"text":"Cleaver left Algeria in 1972, moving to Paris, France, becoming a born again Christian during time in isolation living underground. He turned his hand to fashion design; three years later, he released codpiece-revival \"virility pants\" he called \"the Cleavers\", enthusing that they would give men \"a chance to assert their masculinity\"."}
{"text":"Cleaver returned to the United States in 1977 to face the unresolved attempted murder charge. By September 1978, on bail as those proceedings dragged on, he had incorporated Eldridge Cleaver Ltd, running a factory and West Hollywood shop exploiting his \"Cleavers\", which he claimed liberated men from \"penis binding\". He saw no conflict with his newfound Christianity, drawing support for his overtly sexual design from 22 Deuteronomy. The long-outstanding charge was subsequently resolved on a plea bargain reducing it to assault. A sentence of 1,200 hours' community service was imposed."}
{"text":"In the early 1980s, Cleaver became disillusioned with what he saw as the commercial nature of evangelical Christianity and examined alternatives, including Sun Myung Moon's campus ministry organization CARP. He later led a short-lived revivalist ministry called Eldridge Cleaver Crusades, \"a hybrid synthesis of Islam and Christianity he called 'Christlam'\", along with an auxiliary called the Guardians of the Sperm."}
{"text":"Cleaver was then later baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) on December 11, 1983. He periodically attended regular services and lectured by invitation at LDS gatherings."}
{"text":"By the 1980s, Cleaver had become a conservative Republican. He appeared at various Republican events and spoke at a California Republican State Central Committee meeting regarding his political transformation. In 1984, he ran for election to the Berkeley City Council but lost. Undaunted, he promoted his candidacy in the Republican Party primary for the 1986 Senate race but was again defeated. The next year, his 20-year marriage to Kathleen Neal Cleaver came to an end."}
{"text":"In 1988, Cleaver was placed on probation for burglary and was briefly jailed later in the year after testing positive for cocaine. He entered drug rehabilitation for a stated crack cocaine addiction two years later, but was arrested for possession by Oakland and Berkeley Police in 1992 and 1994. Shortly after his final arrest, he moved to Southern California, falling into poor health."}
{"text":"Cleaver died at age 62 on May 1, 1998, at Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center in Pomona, California. He is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, California."}
{"text":"While in prison, he wrote a number of philosophical and political essays, first published in \"Ramparts\" magazine and then in book form as \"Soul on Ice\". In the essays, Cleaver traces his own development from a \"supermasculine menial\" to a radical black liberationist, and his essays became highly influential in the black power movement."}
{"text":"In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto \"for practice\" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired, motivated by a genuine conviction that the rape of white women was \"an insurrectionary act\". When he began writing \"Soul on Ice\", he unequivocally renounced rape and all his previous reasoning about it."}
{"text":"The essays in \"Soul on Ice\" are divided into four thematic sections: \"Letters from Prison\", describing Cleaver's experiences with and thoughts on crime and prisons; \"Blood of the Beast\", discussing race relations and promoting black liberation ideology; \"Prelude to Love \u2013 Three Letters\", love letters written to Cleaver's attorney, Beverly Axelrod; and \"White Woman, Black Man\", on gender relations, black masculinity, and sexuality."}
{"text":"Ariel Serena Hedges Bowen (March 3, 1863 \u2013 July 7, 1904) was an African-American writer, temperance activist, and professor of music at Clark University in Atlanta in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. \"Twentieth Century Negro Literature\" (1902) noted that \"she is regarded as one of the foremost and best cultured women of her race.\""}
{"text":"In 1886, Hedges was married to Dr. J. W. E. Bowen of the Gammon Theological Seminary, Atlanta, Georgia. She became a life member of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She moved to Atlanta with her husband in 1893, where the couple raised a family of four children (one son and three daughters)."}
{"text":"Bowen became Professor of Music in Clark University in 1895, writing broadly on music (\"Music in the Home\"), as well as being an accomplished vocalist and musician with the piano and pipe organ."}
{"text":"Bowen also was a notable figure in the Southern Women's Christian Temperance Union, writing \"The Ethics of Reform\" and serving as state president of the Georgia W. C. T. U., No. 2."}
{"text":"Ariel Bowen Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia is named in her memory."}
{"text":"Donna LaVonne Franklin is an African-American social scientist and author, and a nationally recognized scholar on African American families."}
{"text":"Franklin was born to Donald A. Franklin and Helen Kirkpatrick Franklin in Los Angeles, California. When she was young, her parents moved to La Sierra, California (later annexed to the City of Riverside). She attended elementary school and began high school in Riverside."}
{"text":"For her last years of high school Franklin transferred to the co-educational African American boarding school Pine Forge Academy, located in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The campus was built on land once owned by Thomas Rutter, an abolitionist iron miller, and was a terminal for the Underground Railroad during the closing days of the Civil War."}
{"text":"Franklin graduated from Loma Linda University with a BA in Sociology, and holds a Master\u2019s in social work and a PhD from the University of Southern California."}
{"text":"Franklin was the first African American woman to be appointed at the assistant professor level at the University of Chicago School of Social Administration, in 1982. She was recruited by Dolores Norton, a graduate of Temple University and Bryn Mawr, who was the first African American woman to be tenured at the University of Chicago."}
{"text":"During Franklin\u2019s tenure at the University of Chicago, she was a co-investigator on a multimillion-dollar research project that focused on urban poverty and family structure. Primarily, her interests included how social and structural processes interact to influence an adolescent female\u2019s decisions regarding sexuality and pregnancy. Six years later, Franklin was promoted to associate professor."}
{"text":"In 1994, Franklin accepted the John Milner Visiting Professor appointment at the University of Southern California. From 1997 to 2008, she taught Advanced Social Theory at Smith College, a required course in the doctoral program at Smith\u2019s School for Social Work. Franklin has also held academic appointments at Howard and Tuskegee universities."}
{"text":"Franklin was one of the first national co-chairs of the Council on Contemporary Families, from 1997 to 1999, and has also served on its board of directors. She retired from academic life to focus on writing in 2008."}
{"text":"Franklin's first book, \"Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African American Family,\" was based on her research at University of Chicago and included a foreword by William Julius Wilson, a Harvard University Professor and recipient of the National Medal of Science. Published by Oxford University Press in 1997, \"Ensuring Inequality\" won the American Sociological Association's William J. Goode Distinguished Book Award; She was the first African-American author to win this award."}
{"text":"Franklin's second book, \"What's Love Got to Do With It: Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women\", was published by Simon & Schuster in 2000. It examines the history and tensions of gender relations in the African American community."}
{"text":"Franklin is currently working on a memoir with the working title \"From Slavery to Freedom: A Memoir of an American Family and Myself.\""}
{"text":"Franklin has contributed essays to two anthologies. \u201cAfrican Americans and the Birth of the Modern Marriage\u201d is included in \"Families As They Really Are,\" a collection penned by an interdisciplinary community of experts who study and work with families."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Obama Marriage: A Model for Moving Forward the \u2018Stalled Revolution\u2019\u201d appears in \"Obama on Our Minds: The Impact of Obama on the Psyche of America.\" Published in 2016, the book was written by multicultural theorists and researchers, who delve into President Barack Obama\u2019s success and societal impact."}
{"text":"Among other chapters, academic papers, and shorter pieces, Franklin has penned an op-ed published in the \"New York Times\" entitled \"Black Herstory.\" Written in the wake of the Million Man March, the piece outlines the distinctive \u201cherstory\u201d of black women\u2019s equality with black men (compared to other American women) following their emancipation from slavery and its aftermath, and argues that, consequently, black women should have been included in the march."}
{"text":"On her father\u2019s side, Franklin is descended from one of the first African American families to settle in California\u2019s San Gabriel Valley. Approximately 50 members of the Franklin family are buried in the historic Savannah Memorial Park in Rosemead."}
{"text":"Franklin\u2019s great-grandfather Lawrence (usually called Harry) was born in the state about 1864. Her paternal great-grandmother, Sabra Ann Hardison, was born a slave in the township of Jamesville, North Carolina, around the beginning of the Civil War. Sabra Ann came to California as a domestic servant to members of the family of Gail Borden, Jr. (inventor of condensed milk), and settled in the San Gabriel Valley."}
{"text":"Sabra Ann met Harry shortly after she arrived, a consequence of the two being among the few African Americans in the area. Harry spoke fluent Spanish and was at the time employed by the sheriff in El Monte. Sabra Ann and Harry married on October 2, 1886, and lived out their lives in Alhambra, California."}
{"text":"Franklin was married to historian and playwright Bart McSwine from 1971 to 1982. She is the mother of one daughter, Myisha Karimah McSwine, and one grandson, Malo Kagen McSwine."}
{"text":"William J. Anderson wrote a narrative describing his life as a slave."}
{"text":"Anderson is believed to have been born on or around June 2, 1811, to Susan and Lewis Anderson. William's mother was a free woman, but his father was a slave, belonging to a Mr. Shelton. Later in William's life he wrote a narrative about himself that was published by the \"Chicago Daily Tribune\" and entitled:"}
{"text":"Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! or The Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. Containing Scriptural Views of the Origin of the Black and of the White Man. Also, a Simple and Easy Plan to Abolish Slavery in the United States. Together with an Account of the Services of Colored Men in the Revolutionary War--Day and Date, and Interesting Facts."}
{"text":"After the death of his father, his mother Susan sold William to Mr. Vance, who lived about ten miles away from her. William's life with Mr. Vance was not a good one. William was very interested in learning how to read and write and would often secretly steal or borrow books from white boys to practice these skills. Whenever his master discovered what William had been up to, he would whip and kick him. Nevertheless, William remained devoted to learning."}
{"text":"William was a devout Christian. He believed that if he was a good Christian, he would go to heaven. He thought that this was important because he had never been treated well on earth, and it would be one place he could be happy and rest. Finally after much practice and determination, William learned how to read. The next thing that he wanted to do was learn how to write. Late at night, when his master was asleep, he would practice his writing by candlelight. He soon took to teaching a short lesson on Sundays to some of the other slaves on the plantation. But soon the white people found out and banned them from meeting again to talk about learning. Anderson was a slave."}
{"text":"On December 12, 1856, William was arrested and charged with helping slaves from Kentucky. On pages 53 and 54 of his narrative he explains how horribly he was treated by the guards. He also explains what it was like to be an African American during those times in jail charged with such a crime. When the day of the trial came, several people testified against him but nevertheless, the court found him a free man. In the Appendix of his narrative it has a plan that he has written for a plan to abolish slavery:"}
{"text":"Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. (born September 18, 1951) is an American retired neurosurgeon, author, and politician who served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021. He was a candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries. He is considered a pioneer in the field of neurosurgery."}
{"text":"Carson became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children\u2019s Center in 1984 at age 33; he was the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the United States. At retirement, he was professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Carson's achievements include participating in the first reported separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head. Although surgically a success, the twins continued to suffer neurologic\/medical complications. Additional accomplishments include performing the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb; developing new methods to treat brain-stem tumors; and revitalizing hemispherectomy techniques for controlling seizures. He wrote over 100 neurosurgical publications. He retired from medicine in 2013."}
{"text":"Carson has received numerous honors for his neurosurgery work, including more than 60 honorary doctorate degrees and numerous national merit citations. In 2001, he was named by CNN and \"TIME\" magazine as one of the nation's 20 foremost physicians and scientists, and was selected by the Library of Congress as one of 89 \"Living Legends\" on its 200th anniversary. In 2008, Carson was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2010, he was elected into the National Academy of Medicine. He was the subject of the 2009 TV film \"\", where he was portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. Carson has also written and co-written six bestselling books."}
{"text":"Carson has said that he protected white students in a biology lab after a race riot broke out at his high school in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. \"The Wall Street Journal\" confirmed the riot but could not find anyone who remembered Carson sheltering white students."}
{"text":"In the summers following his high school graduation until his second year in medical school, Carson worked at a variety of jobs: as a clerk in the payroll office of Ford Motor Company, supervisor of a six-person crew picking up trash along the highway under a federal jobs program for inner-city students, a clerk in the mailroom of Young & Rubicam Advertising, assembling fender parts and inspecting back window louvers on the assembly line at Chrysler, a crane operator at Sennett Steel, and finally a radiology technician taking X-rays. At Yale, Carson had a part-time job on campus as a student police aide."}
{"text":"In his autobiography, Carson said he had been offered a scholarship to West Point. \"Politico\" reported that West Point has no record of his ever seeking admission. The academy does not award scholarships to anyone; cadets receive a free education and room and board in exchange for a commitment to serve in the military for at least five years after graduation. Carson also said the University of Michigan had offered him a scholarship. His staff later said the described scenario was similar to that of West Point, as he never actually applied for entry to the University of Michigan."}
{"text":"Carson entered the University of Michigan Medical School in 1973, and at first he struggled academically, doing so poorly on his first set of comprehensive exams that his faculty adviser recommended he drop out of medical school or take a reduced academic load and take longer to finish. He continued with a regular academic load, and his grades improved to average in his first year of medical school. By his second year of medical school, Carson began to excel academically by seldom attending lectures and instead studying textbooks and lecture notes from 6a.m. to 11p.m. Carson graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School with an M.D. in 1977, and he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society."}
{"text":"Carson was then accepted by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurosurgery program, where he served one year as a surgical intern and five years as a neurosurgery resident, completing the final year as chief resident in 1983. He then spent one year (1983\u20131984) as a Senior Registrar in neurosurgery at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Nedlands, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia."}
{"text":"Upon returning to Johns Hopkins in 1984, Carson was appointed the university's Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery. As a surgeon, he specialized in traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, achondroplasia, neurological and congenital disorders, craniosynostosis, epilepsy, and trigeminal neuralgia. He has said that his hand\u2013eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning made him a gifted surgeon."}
{"text":"While at Johns Hopkins, Carson figured in the revival of the hemispherectomy, a drastic surgical procedure in which part or all of one hemisphere of the brain is removed to control severe pediatric epilepsy. Encouraged by John M. Freeman, he refined the procedure in the 1980s and performed it many times."}
{"text":"According to \"The Washington Post\", the Binder surgery \"launched the stardom\" of Carson, who \"walked out of the operating room that day into a spotlight that has never dimmed\", beginning with a press conference that was covered worldwide, and it created name recognition leading to publishing deals and a motivational speaking career. On the condition the film would have its premiere in Baltimore, Carson agreed to a cameo appearance as \"head surgeon\" in the 2003 Farrelly brothers' comedy \"Stuck on You\", starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins who, unhappy after their surgical separation, continue life attached to each other by Velcro."}
{"text":"In March 2013, Carson announced he would retire as a surgeon, saying he would \"much rather quit when I'm at the top of my game\". His retirement became official on July 1, 2013."}
{"text":"In 2021, Carson joined Galectin Therapeutics to assist with development of the Company\u2019s galectin-3 inhibitor, belapectin, as a treatment for NASH cirrhosis and in combination with immunotherapy for the treatment of cancers."}
{"text":"Carson has written many articles in peer-reviewed journals and six bestselling books published by Zondervan, an international Christian media and publishing company. The first book was an autobiography published in 1992. Two others are about his personal philosophies of success and what he sees as the stabilizing influence of religion."}
{"text":"Carson delivered the keynote address at a Mannatech distributor convention in 2011, during which he said the company had donated funds to help him obtain a coveted endowed-chair post at Johns Hopkins Medicine: \"...three years ago I had an endowed chair bestowed upon me and uh, it requires $2.5 million to do an endowed chair, and I'm proud to say that part of that $2.5 million came from Mannatech.\" In October 2015, Carson's campaign team said \"there was no contribution from Mannatech to Johns Hopkins\", and his statement had been \"a legitimate mistake on his part. Confusion. He had been doing some fundraising for the hospital and some other chairs about that time, and he simply got things mixed up.\""}
{"text":"On November 3, 2015, Mannatech said on its website that for compliance with Federal campaign finance regulations, the company had removed all references to Carson before he announced his bid for the presidency."}
{"text":"In July 2013, Carson was hired by \"The Washington Times\" as a weekly opinion columnist. In October 2013, Fox News hired Carson as a contributor, to provide analysis and commentary across Fox News Channel's daytime and primetime programming, a relationship that lasted until the end of 2014."}
{"text":"In 2014, some House Republicans (who later formed the House Freedom Caucus) approached Carson about the possibility of his standing for Speaker of the House in the event that the incumbent Speaker, John Boehner, had to step down due to intra-party disunion. Carson declined, citing preparations for his 2016 presidential campaign. Ultimately, Boehner resigned in October 2015, and Paul Ryan was elected as the new Speaker."}
{"text":"Carson, who had been registered as a Republican, changed his registration to independent in the 1990s after watching Republicans impeach President Clinton for perjury regarding an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. \"I just saw so much hypocrisy in both parties,\" he said. In February 2013, Carson said he was not a member of any political party."}
{"text":"In his book \"America the Beautiful\" (2013), he wrote: \"I believe it is a very good idea for physicians, scientists, engineers, and others trained to make decisions based on facts and empirical data to get involved in the political arena.\""}
{"text":"Carson's sudden popularity among conservatives led to his being invited as a featured speaker at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He tied for seventh place in the \"Washington Times\"\/CPAC 2013 Straw Poll with 4% of the 3,000 ballots cast. In the 2014 CPAC straw poll, he was in third place with 9% of the vote, behind senators Ted Cruz of Texas (with 11%) and Rand Paul of Kentucky (31%). In the presidential straw poll at the 2013 Values Voter Summit, he and Rick Santorum polled 13%, with winner Ted Cruz polling 42%, and in 2014 he polled 20% to Cruz's winning 25%."}
{"text":"On November 4, 2014, the day of the 2014 midterms, he rejoined the Republican Party, saying it was \"truly a pragmatic move\" because he was considering running for president in 2016."}
{"text":"In January 2015, \"The Weekly Standard\" reported that the Draft Carson Committee had raised $13 million by the end of 2014, shortly after Carson performed well in a CNN\/ORC poll of potential candidates in December 2014, coming second in two different versions. He polled 10% to Mitt Romney's 20%, but in the same poll with Romney removed from the list, Carson polled 11% to Jeb Bush's 14%. \"The Wall Street Journal\" mentioned that the Draft Carson Committee had chairmen in all of Iowa's 99 counties, and that Carson had recently led two separate Public Policy polls for the state of Pennsylvania."}
{"text":"In October 2015, the Super PAC supporting Carson, The 2016 Committee (formerly the Draft Carson Committee), announced it had received donations in mostly $100 increments from more than 200 small businesses around the country over the course of one week. Fox Business reported that \"Carson's outsider status is growing his small business support base.\" Ben Walters, a fundraiser for The 2016 Committee, expressed optimism about Carson's small business support base: \"It's unbelievable the diversity of businesses that we are bringing on. We are seeing everything from doctors' offices and folks in the healthcare profession to motorcycle repair shops and bed and breakfasts.\""}
{"text":"In October, it was noted that Carson's \"improbable\" political career had surged in polls and fundraising, while he continued to participate in nationally televised Republican debates."}
{"text":"In November 2015, Carson's campaign aired a 60-second TV advertisement in which excerpts from Carson's stump speech were intercut with a rap by an artist named Aspiring Mogul. They spent $150,000 on the ads, which were aired in Atlanta, Detroit and Miami. Carson defended the ad, saying \"Well, there are people in the campaign who felt that was a good way to do things... I support them in doing that, but I probably would have taken a little different approach.\" Later, he said the advertisement was done without his knowledge, that \"it was done by people who have no concept of the black community and what they were doing\", and that he was \"horrified\" by it."}
{"text":"Statements that Carson made regarding foreign policy called into doubt his familiarity with the domain. \"The New York Times\" reported in 2015, \"Carson has acknowledged being something of a novice on foreign affairs.\" Regarding the Ukrainian crisis, Carson would send arms to Ukraine to aid it in its fight against pro-Russian rebels. He also believes the Baltic states should \"get involved in NATO\" (apparently unaware they are NATO members)."}
{"text":"In a November 2015 Republican debate, Carson declared his intentions to make ISIS \"look like losers\" as he would \"destroy their caliphate\". Carson also advocated capturing a \"big energy field\" outside of Anbar, Iraq, which he said could be accomplished \"fairly easily\". Regarding the Middle East, he also claimed that \"the Chinese are there\", while in contrast, \"The Guardian\" reported that \"there are no known members of the Chinese armed forces currently engaged in any conflict in the Middle East.\""}
{"text":"Carson said he is not opposed to a Palestinian state, but he questioned why it needs \"to be within the confines of Israeli territory [...] Is that necessary, or can you sort of slip that area down into Egypt?\""}
{"text":"On March 2, following the Super Tuesday 2016 primaries, Carson announced that he did \"not see a political path forward\" and would not attend the next Republican debate in Detroit. He said, \"this grassroots movement on behalf of 'We the People' will continue,\" indicating that he would give more details later in the week. He suspended his campaign on March4 and announced he would be the new national chairman of My Faith Votes, a group that encourages Christians to exercise their civic duty to vote."}
{"text":"In total, Ben Carson's campaign spent $58 million. However, most of the money went to political consultants and fundraising rather than advertising. Carson questioned whether his campaign was economically sabotaged from within."}
{"text":"On March 11, 2016, a week after Carson ended his presidential campaign, he endorsed Trump, calling him part of \"the voice of the people to be heard\". Carson's subsequent comments that Americans would have to sustain Trump for only four years if he was not a good president drew criticism, and he admitted that he would have preferred another candidate, though he thought Trump had the best chance of winning the general election."}
{"text":"On the other hand, at the press conference Carson said Trump had a \"cerebral\" side."}
{"text":"On April 25, Carson expressed opposition to Harriet Tubman replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill the day after dubbing the replacement \"political expediency\", though he indicated interest in Tubman having another tribute. In late April, Carson wrote to the Nevada Republican Party, requesting the two delegates he won in Nevada be released and free to support whoever they want."}
{"text":"On May 4, after Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination, he hinted that Carson would be among those who would vet his vice-presidential pick. The same day, in an interview Carson expressed interest in Ted Cruz serving as Attorney General of the United States, a position that Carson said would allow Cruz to prosecute Hillary Clinton, and then as a Supreme Court Justice nominee from the Trump administration. On May 6, Carson said in an interview that Trump would consider a Democrat as his running mate, conflicting with Trump's assertion that he would not. A Carson spokesperson later said Carson expected Trump to select a Republican."}
{"text":"Carson was said by aide Armstrong Williams in a May 10 interview to have withdrawn from the Trump campaign's vetting team, though the campaign confirmed he was still involved. Later that month, Carson revealed a list of potential vice-presidential candidates in an interview with \"The Washington Post\". On May 16, Carson said the media could not keep opinion out of reporting and cited Walter Cronkite as a fair journalist who was, in his words, a \"left-wing radical\"."}
{"text":"During the Republican National Convention, Carson appeared with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in support of the pro-Donald Trump Great America PAC at an event in Cleveland."}
{"text":"In total, Carson received 857,039 votes during the Republican primaries; this total represented 2.75% of the votes cast. He received the support of seven delegates at the Republican National Convention. Trump received the Republican nomination and went on to be elected president on November 8, 2016."}
{"text":"After Donald Trump's win in the 2016 election, Carson joined Trump's transition team as Vice Chairman. Carson was also offered a cabinet position in the administration. He declined, in part because of his lack of experience, with an aide stating, \"The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.\" Although it was reported that the position was for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Carson's business manager has disputed this, stating, \"Dr. Carson was never offered a specific position, but everything was open to him.\" He was eventually offered the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, which he accepted."}
{"text":"On December 5, 2016, Trump announced that he would nominate Carson to the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. During the confirmation process, Carson was scrutinized by some housing advocates for what they perceived as his lack of relevant experience."}
{"text":"On January 24, 2017, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs voted unanimously to approve the nomination. Senate Democrats attempted to defeat Carson's nomination via filibuster, but that vote failed on March 1, 2017, and he was then confirmed by the Senate by a 58\u201341 vote the next day."}
{"text":"On March 6, his first day as secretary, while addressing Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employees, Carson saluted the work ethic of immigrants, and during his comments, he likened slaves to involuntary immigrants. A HUD spokesman said that no one present thought Carson \"was equating voluntary immigration with involuntary servitude\". In the same speech, Carson was criticized by some for saying that the human brain \"was incapable of forgetting and could be electrically stimulated into perfect recall\"."}
{"text":"Under the federal budget proposed by Trump in 2017, HUD's budget for the fiscal year 2018 would be cut by $6.2 billion (13%) and the Community Development Block Grant, a program which Carson praised in a trip to Detroit as HUD secretary, would be eliminated. Carson issued a statement supporting the proposed cuts. Carson suggested that federal funds for housing in Detroit could be part of an expected infrastructure bill."}
{"text":"In April 2017, while speaking in Washington at the National Low Income Housing Coalition conference, Carson said that housing funding would be included in an upcoming infrastructure bill from the Trump administration."}
{"text":"In July 2017, during his keynote address at the LeadingAge Florida annual convention, Carson stated his concern about \"seniors who become destitute\" and reported that the Department of Housing and Urban Development had increased public housing programs for the elderly by an unspecified number."}
{"text":"During congressional testimony in May 2019, Carson did not know what the term REO (\"Real Estate Owned\" refers to housing owned by a bank or lending institution post-foreclosure) stood for and confused it with the cookie, Oreo. In response, Carson went on the Fox Business Network where he accused Democrats of adhering to \"Saul Alinsky\" tactics."}
{"text":"On March 1, 2020, the office of Vice President Mike Pence announced Carson's addition to the White House Coronavirus Task Force."}
{"text":"On November 9, 2020, Carson tested positive for COVID-19 after attending President Trump's Election Night party. He initially treated himself with a homeopathic oleander extract on the recommendation of Mike Lindell, the founder of My Pillow, Inc., which Carson said caused his symptoms to disappear. Oleander was previously rejected by the Food and Drug Administration as a treatment for COVID-19 and Carson received criticism for promoting an unscientific homeopathic treatment. He disclosed on November 20 that he subsequently became \"extremely sick\" and attributed his recovery to Regeneron's experimental antibody therapy. He said that President Trump had given him access to the drug."}
{"text":"Remarks on transgender use of homeless shelters."}
{"text":"Carson was accused by members of the Department of Housing and Urban Development of making transphobic remarks at a meeting in San Francisco in September 2019. He warned that \"big, hairy men\" might infiltrate homeless shelters for women, prompting one woman to walk out. Reps. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts and Jennifer Wexton of Virginia called for his resignation, but Carson said the accusations were a \"mischaracterization\". A HUD spokesperson responded that Carson \"does not use derogatory language to refer to transgendered individuals. Any reporting to the contrary is false.\""}
{"text":"In 1994, Carson and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund that awards scholarships to students in grades 4\u201311 for \"academic excellence and humanitarian qualities\"."}
{"text":"Recipients of the Carson Scholars Fund receive a $1,000 scholarship towards their college education. It has awarded 6,700 scholarships. In recognition for his work with the Carson Scholars Fund and other charitable giving throughout his lifetime, Carson was awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership in 2005."}
{"text":"In 2021, Carson founded the American Cornerstone Institute or ACI, a conservative think tank centered around advancing policies that promote \"faith, liberty, community, and life.\""}
{"text":"The ACI's mission statement is \"dedicated to promoting and preserving individual and religious liberty, helping our country\u2019s most vulnerable find new hope, and developing methods to decrease the federal government\u2019s role in society and to improve efficiency to best serve ALL our nation\u2019s citizens. Headed by world-renowned neurosurgeon, presidential candidate, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, ACI will be a voice for reason and civility in a nation that is increasingly devoid of common sense.\""}
{"text":"Carson and his wife, fellow Detroit native Lacena \"Candy\" Rustin, met in 1971 as students at Yale University and married in 1975. They began living in West Friendship, Maryland, in 1988. Together, the couple have three sons (Rhoeyce, Benjamin Jr., and Murray), as well as several grandchildren. Their oldest son, Murray, was born in Perth, Australia, while Carson was undertaking a residency there. In 1981 Carson's wife became pregnant with twins before miscarrying in the fifth month of her pregnancy."}
{"text":"In 2001, Ben and Candy Carson bought a 48-acre property in Upperco, Maryland."}
{"text":"After being diagnosed with prostate cancer, Carson underwent a two-hour operation at the Johns Hopkins Hospital on August 7, 2002."}
{"text":"In 2013, Carson, his wife, and Carson's mother moved to West Palm Beach, Florida."}
{"text":"Surrounding his confirmation as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carson bought a $1.22 million home in Vienna, Virginia, in February 2017 and sold his West Palm Beach home for over $900,000 in May 2017."}
{"text":"Carson and his wife are members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA). Carson was baptized at Burns Seventh-day Adventist Church in Detroit. A few years later, he told the pastor at a church he was attending in Inkster, Michigan, that he had not fully understood his first baptism and wanted to be baptized again. He has served as a local elder and Sabbath School teacher in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Although Carson is an Adventist, the church has officially cautioned church employees to remain politically neutral."}
{"text":"In keeping with his Seventh-day Adventist faith, Carson announced in 2014 his belief \"that the United States will play a big role\" in the coming apocalypse. He went on to say, \"I hope by that time I'm not around anymore.\""}
{"text":"In an interview with Katie Couric, Carson said that Jesus Christ came to Earth to redeem the world through his atoning sacrifice and that all people are sinners and need his redemption."}
{"text":"Carson has stated that he does not believe in hell as understood by some Christians: \"You know, I see God as a very loving individual. And why would he torment somebody forever who only had a life of 60 or 70 or 80 years? Even if they were evil. Even if they were only evil for 80 years?\" This is fully in line with Adventist teaching, which promotes annihilationism."}
{"text":"Carson endorsed Seventh-day Adventist theology, which includes belief in a literal reading of the first chapters of Genesis. In a 2013 interview with \"Adventist News Network\", Carson said \"You know, I'm proud of the fact that I believe what God has said, and I've said many times that I'll defend it before anyone. If they want to criticize the fact that I believe in a literal, six-day creation, let's have at it because I will poke all kinds of holes in what they believe.\" Carson's Adventism was raised as an issue by his then-primary rival Donald Trump. Some Adventists have argued that Carson's political positions on gun rights and religious liberty conflict with historic Adventist teachings in favor of nonviolence, pacifism, and the separation of church and state."}
{"text":"During a commencement speech at Andrews University in Michigan in 1998, Carson stated that he believed that the pyramids of Giza were created by the Biblical figure Joseph to store grain, despite the fact that the story of Joseph is set in the time of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, five centuries after the pyramids of Giza were built. When questioned about it again in 2015, he stood by his original assertion."}
{"text":"Carson is a member of the American Academy of Achievement, Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans."}
{"text":"Carson has been awarded 38 honorary doctorate degrees and dozens of national merit citations. Detroit Public Schools opened the Dr. Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine for students interested in pursuing healthcare careers. The school is partnering with Detroit Receiving Hospital and Michigan State University."}
{"text":"Xernona Clayton Brady (n\u00e9e Brewster, born August 30, 1930) is an American civil rights leader and broadcasting executive. During the Civil Rights Movement, she worked for the National Urban League and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she became involved in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Later, Clayton went into television, where she became the first African American from the southern United States to host a daily prime time talk show. She became corporate vice president for urban affairs for Turner Broadcasting."}
{"text":"Clayton created the Trumpet Foundation. She was instrumental in the development of the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame that was developed by the foundation to honor the achievements of African Americans and civil rights advocates. She convinced a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to denounce the Klan. Clayton has been honored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the city of Atlanta for her work."}
{"text":"Xernona and her twin sister Xenobia were born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the daughters of Reverend James and Elliott (Lillie) Brewster. Her parents were administrators of Indian affairs in Muskogee, Oklahoma. In 1952, Clayton earned her undergraduate degree with honors from Tennessee State Agricultural and Industrial College in Nashville, Tennessee. She majored in music and minored in education. At TSU, Clayton became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She is a Baptist. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago."}
{"text":"Clayton began her career in the Civil Rights Movement with the National Urban League in Chicago, working undercover to investigate racial discrimination committed by employers against African Americans. Clayton moved to Atlanta in 1965, where she organized events for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), under the direction of Martin Luther King Jr. She developed a deep friendship with Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King. Clayton and Scott King traveled together on concert tours. Although Clayton did not march with King, citing a fear of being arrested, Clayton helped plan King's marches."}
{"text":"In 1966, Clayton coordinated the Doctors' Committee for Implementation, a group of African American physicians who worked for and achieved the desegregation of all Atlanta hospitals. The Doctors' Committee served as a model for nationwide hospital desegregation, and was honored by the National Medical Association."}
{"text":"Clayton then headed the Atlanta Model Cities program, a federally funded group dedicated to improving the quality of desegregated neighborhoods. Clayton met Calvin Craig, the Grand Dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, through the Model Cities program, as Craig served in a policy position with the organization. Craig cited Clayton's influence when he decided to denounce the Klan in April 1968."}
{"text":"In 1967, Clayton became the first Southern African American to host a daily prime time talk show. The show was broadcast on WAGA-TV in Atlanta and was renamed, \"The Xernona Clayton Show\". Clayton joined Turner Broadcasting in 1979 as a producer of documentary specials. In the 1980s, she served as director of public relations for Turner Broadcasting. In 1988, Turner Broadcasting promoted Clayton to corporate vice president for urban affairs, assigning her to direct Turner projects and serve as a liaison between Turner Broadcasting and civic groups in Atlanta and throughout the country. Clayton retired from Turner Broadcasting in 1997, choosing to call the retirement a \"professional transition\"."}
{"text":"Clayton serves on the board of directors of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She served on the Board of Review for the state of Georgia's Department of Labor. In 1991, she published an autobiography, \"I've Been Marching All The Time\", a title inspired by King. The book focused on her life and her views of the Civil Rights Movement."}
{"text":"In 1993, Clayton, with Turner Broadcasting, created the Trumpet Awards to honor achievements of African Americans. She serves as the chair, president, and CEO of the Trumpet Awards Foundation that was formed in late 2004. In early 2004, Clayton created the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame."}
{"text":"Clayton was a member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the pastor."}
{"text":"Clayton was married to Ed Clayton (who also worked with Dr. King) from 1957 until his death in 1966. She co-authored a revised edition of her late husband's biography of Martin Luther King Jr. that is entitled, \"The Peaceful Warrior\"."}
{"text":"Following her first husband's death, Clayton married Paul L. Brady, the first African American to be appointed as a Federal Administrative Law Judge, in 1974. Brady and Clayton have two children from Brady's previous marriage, Laura and Paul Jr."}
{"text":"TSU honored Clayton at their Blue and White All-Star Academy Awards in 2005. Clayton's footprints were added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame in 2006. On May 1, 2011, Clayton received the James Weldon Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She received the Local Community Service Award from Spelman College in 2004."}
{"text":"In September 2011, the Atlanta City Council renamed a street and a plaza at Hardy Ivy Park in downtown Atlanta in Clayton's honor. In conjunction with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the AFC Enterprises Foundation awards an annual Xernona Clayton Black Press Scholarship amounting to $10,000 to a student pursuing a doctoral degree in journalism. The Mattel Toy Company created a \"Xernona Clayton Barbie\" doll in her honor in 2004."}
{"text":"Sharon Bridgforth (born May 15, 1958 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American writer working in theater."}
{"text":"Bridgforth was born in Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, and moved to South Central Los Angeles when she was 3 years old. She discovered the diversity of the city during her long bus commutes to school."}
{"text":"From 1993 to 1998, Bridgforth worked as the founder, writer, and artistic director of the root wy'mn theatre company. root wy'mn's touring roster included: the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, The Theater Offensive in Boston, La Pe\u00f1a Cultural Center in Berkeley, California and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis."}
{"text":"From 2002 to 2009, she served as the anchor artist for the Austin Project, produced by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Her work, \"Finding Voice Facilitation Method\" was published in \"Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project\" edited by Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and herself."}
{"text":"In 2008, Bridgforth received a National Performance Network Creation Fund award, for \"delta dandi\", co-commissioned by Women & Their Work, in partnership with the National Performance Network. Freedom Train Productions in New York presented a reading of the work in 2008. A workshop production of the work was produced in 2009 at the Long Center in Austin, Texas."}
{"text":"At Northwestern University, as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation artist-in-residence in the Performance Studies department, Bridgforth presented a workshop production of \"delta dandi\" during the 2009 Solo\/Black\/Woman performance series. Since 2009, Bridgforth has been resident playwright at New Dramatists, New York. Her work \"blood pudding\", was presented in the 2010 New York SummerStage Festival."}
{"text":"She was the 2010\u20132012 Visiting Multicultural Faculty member at the Theatre School at DePaul University and is the curator of the Theatrical Jazz Institute at Links Hall, produced by the school, Links Hall and herself."}
{"text":"Published by RedBone Press, \"the bull-jean stories\" give cultural documentation and social commentary on African-American herstory and survival. Set in the rural South of the 1920s through the 1940s, \"the bull-jean stories \"uses traditional storytelling and nontraditional verse to chronicle the course of love returning in the lifetimes of one woman-loving-woman named bull-dog-jean."}
{"text":"Both a performance and a novel,\" Love Conjure\/Blues\" places the fiction-form inside a traditional Black American voice, inviting dramatic interpretation and movement within a highly literary text: It is filled with folktales, poetry, haints, prophecy, song, and oral history. \"Love Conjure\/Blues \"was also published by RedBone Press."}
{"text":"Exists as a show, oracle deck, performance\/novel, performance, sung children's book, and artistic mentorship towards homeownership. The performance celebrates the different embodiments of gender through the journey of three characters alongside Yoburba deities Oya, Osun, and Yemaya. The show premiered at the Pillsbury House + Theater in Minneapolis, MN, on May 30, 2018 and ran through June 17, 2018. The performance was written by Sharon Bridgforth, directed by Ebony Noelle Golden, with dramaturgy by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and vocal composition by Mankwe Ndosi."}
{"text":"In addition to a performance, \"dat Black Mermaid Man Lady\" is an oracle deck. The deck consists of characters from the performance\/novel and features artwork by Yasmin Hernandez. The oracle deck is a working deck that Bridgforth used for a series of weekly readings."}
{"text":"Partnering with Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association and City of Lakes Community Land Trust, Bridgforth worked with five to seven emerging artist of color to create new works and more toward homeownership."}
{"text":"In 1997, Bridgforth's script \"no mo blues \"was nominated for an Osborn Award (sponsored by the American Theatre Critic's Association). \"The bull-jean stories\" won a Lambda Literary Prize for \"Best Book by a Small Press\" in 1998. The collection also received a nomination for a Lambda Literary Prize in the category of \"Best Lesbian Fiction\" and a nomination from the 1998 American Library Association for \"Best Gay\/Lesbian Book\". Bridgforth was nominated for the 2002-2003 Alpert Award in the theatre category. She has received the 2000 Penumbra Theatre (St. Paul, MN) Playwriting Fellowship and 2001 YWCA Woman Of The Year in Arts Award in Austin, Texas."}
{"text":"A recipient of the 2008 Alpert\/Hedgebrook Residency Prize, her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts commissioning program; the National Endowment for the Arts\/Theatre Communications Group, playwright-in-residence program; National Performance Network commissioning and community fund; the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media; and the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Award. Bridgforth was also the recipient of the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award in 2016."}
{"text":"She has a daughter, Sonja Perryman, from a past marriage. A lesbian, her partner is Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. Jones also has a daughter, Leigh Gaymon-Jones, from a past marriage."}
{"text":"Herman Cain (December 13, 1945July 30, 2020) was an American businessman and activist for the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Cain grew up in Georgia and graduated from Morehouse College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. He then earned a master's degree in computer science at Purdue University while also working full-time for the U.S. Department of the Navy. In 1977, he joined the Pillsbury Company where he later became vice president. During the 1980s, Cain's success as a business executive at Burger King prompted Pillsbury to appoint him as chairman and CEO of Godfather's Pizza, in which capacity he served from 1986 to 1996."}
{"text":"Cain was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Omaha Branch from 1989 to 1991. He was deputy chairman, from 1992 to 1994, and then chairman until 1996, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. In 1995, he was appointed to the Kemp Commission and, in 1996, he served as a senior economic adviser to Bob Dole's presidential campaign. From 1996 to 1999, Cain served as president and CEO of the National Restaurant Association."}
{"text":"In May 2011, Cain announced his 2012 presidential candidacy. By the fall, his proposed 9\u20139\u20139 tax plan and debating performances had made him a serious contender for the Republican nomination. In November, however, his campaign faced allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied. He announced the suspension of his campaign on December 3, but remained involved in politics. In the 2020 election cycle, Cain was a co-chairman of Black Voices for Trump."}
{"text":"Cain died from COVID-19 on July 30, 2020, at the age of 74."}
{"text":"Herman Cain was born on December 13, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Lenora Davis Cain (1925\u20131982), a cleaning woman and domestic worker, and Luther Cain (1925\u20132005), who was raised on a farm and worked as a barber and janitor, as well as a chauffeur for Robert W. Woodruff, the president of The Coca-Cola Company. Cain said that as he was growing up, his family was \"poor but happy.\" Cain related that his mother taught him about her belief that \"success was not a function of what you start out with materially, but what you start out with spiritually.\" His father worked three jobs to own his own home\u2014which he achieved during Cain's childhood\u2014and to allow his two sons to attend college."}
{"text":"Cain grew up on the west side of Atlanta, attending S. H. Archer High School and the Rev. Cameron M. Alexander's Antioch Baptist Church North in the neighborhood now known as The Bluff. Eventually the family moved to a modest brick home on Albert Street in the Collier Heights neighborhood. He graduated from high school in 1963."}
{"text":"In 1967, Cain graduated from Morehouse College with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. In 1971, he received a Master of Science in computer science from Purdue University, while working full-time as a ballistics analyst for the U.S. Department of the Navy as a civilian."}
{"text":"After completing his master's degree from Purdue, Cain left the Department of the Navy and began working for Coca-Cola in Atlanta as a computer systems analyst. In 1977, he moved to Minneapolis to join Pillsbury, becoming director of business analysis in its restaurant and foods group in 1978."}
{"text":"At age 36, Cain was assigned to analyze and manage 400 Burger King stores in the Philadelphia area. At the time, Burger King was a Pillsbury subsidiary. Under Cain, his region posted strong improvement in three years. According to a 1987 account in the \"Minneapolis Star Tribune\", Pillsbury's then-president Win Wallin said, \"He was an excellent bet. Herman always seemed to have his act together.\" At Burger King, Cain \"established the BEAMER program, which taught our employees, mostly teenagers, how to make our patrons smile\" by smiling themselves. It was a success: \"Within three months of the program's initiation, the sales trend was moving steadily higher.\""}
{"text":"Cain's success at Burger King prompted Pillsbury to appoint him president and CEO of another subsidiary, Godfather's Pizza. On his arrival on April 1, 1986, Cain told employees, \"I'm Herman Cain and this ain't no April Fool's joke. We are not dead. Our objective is to prove to Pillsbury and everyone else that we will survive.\" Godfather's Pizza was performing poorly, having slipped in ranks of pizza chains from third in 1985 to fifth in 1988. Under Cain's leadership, Godfather's closed approximately 200 restaurants and eliminated several thousand jobs, and by doing so returned to profitability. In a leveraged buyout in 1988, Cain, executive vice president and COO Ronald B. Gartlan, and a group of investors bought Godfather's from Pillsbury."}
{"text":"Federal Reserve Bank and National Restaurant Association."}
{"text":"Cain served as chairman of the board of the Omaha Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from January 1, 1989, to December 31, 1991. He became a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1992. He served as deputy chairman from January 1, 1992, to December 31, 1994, and then as its chairman until August 19, 1996, when he resigned to become active in national politics."}
{"text":"Cain left Godfather's Pizza in 1996 and moved to the District of Columbia, From 1996 to 1999 he served as CEO of the National Restaurant Association, a trade group and lobbying organization for the restaurant industry, on whose board of directors he had previously served. Cain's lobbying work for the association led to a number of connections to Republican lawmakers and politicians. Under Cain's leadership, the Association lobbied against increases to the minimum wage, mandatory health care benefits, regulations against smoking, and lowering the blood alcohol limit that determines whether one is driving under the influence."}
{"text":"Cain was on the board of directors of Aquila, Inc., Nabisco, Whirlpool, Reader's Digest, and AGCO, Inc."}
{"text":"After Cain's term with the restaurant advocacy group ended in 1999, he returned to Omaha for about a year, then moved to his hometown of Atlanta in 2000."}
{"text":"Cain wrote a syndicated op-ed column, which was distributed by the North Star Writers Group."}
{"text":"Cain appeared in the 2009 documentary \"An Inconvenient Tax\". From 2008 to February 2011, Cain hosted \"The Herman Cain Show\" on Atlanta talk radio station WSB. On January 19, 2012, Cain began working for WSB again by providing daily commentaries, while occasionally filling in for Erick Erickson and Neal Boortz."}
{"text":"On October 1, 2012, Cain began writing weekly online columns for the media organization Newsmax, in a series titled \"9\u20139\u20139 To Save America\"."}
{"text":"Cain took over Boortz's radio talk show on January 21, 2013, upon Boortz's retirement. The show was dropped from the Westwood One Radio Network in December 2016 in favor of The Chris Plante Show, but continued to air in limited syndication through WSB's owner, Cox Radio."}
{"text":"On February 15, 2013, Fox News Channel announced Cain would join the network as a contributor. In March 2019, Cain was a panelist on a \"Watter's World\" episode."}
{"text":"Cain received the 1996 Horatio Alger Award and was bestowed with honorary degrees from Creighton University, Johnson & Wales University, Morehouse College, the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln, the New York City College of Technology, Purdue University, Suffolk University, and Tougaloo College."}
{"text":"Then former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Jack Kemp, referred to Cain as \"the Colin Powell of American capitalism\". Kemp stated that Cain's \"conquests won't be counted in terms of countries liberated or lives saved, but in those things that make life worth living\u2014expanding opportunity, creating jobs and broadening horizons, not just for those he knows, but through his example, for those he'll never meet.\""}
{"text":"Possible nomination to the Federal Reserve Board."}
{"text":"On April 4, 2019, President Donald Trump said that he intended to nominate Cain to the second of the two vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board. Assessing the possible nomination, news publications reviewed Cain's sexual misconduct allegations that preceded his withdrawal from the 2012 presidential election. Cain acknowledged that the nomination process would be \"more cumbersome\" for him due to his \"unusual career\". He initially stated that he was not considering withdrawing his name from consideration for the seat. After it appeared likely that he would not receive enough votes to support his confirmation, Cain withdrew on April 22, 2019."}
{"text":"In the 2020 election cycle, Cain was a co-chairman of Black Voices for Trump."}
{"text":"Role in the defeat of 1993 Clinton health care plan."}
{"text":"Because Kemp was impressed with Cain's performance, he chartered a plane to Nebraska to meet Cain after the debate. As a result, Cain was appointed to the Kemp Commission in 1995."}
{"text":"Joshua Green of \"The Atlantic\" called Cain's exchange with President Clinton his \"auspicious debut on the national political stage.\""}
{"text":"Cain was a senior economic adviser to the Bob Dole presidential campaign in 1996."}
{"text":"Cain briefly ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. He later said in looking back at the effort that it was more about making political statements than winning the nomination. \"George W. Bush was the chosen one, he had the campaign DNA that followers look for.\" However, Cain went on to state, \"I believe that I had a better message and I believe that I was the better messenger.\" After ending his own campaign, however, he endorsed Steve Forbes."}
{"text":"In 2004 Cain ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia and did not win in the primaries. He was pursuing the seat that came open with the retirement of Democrat Zell Miller. Cain sought the Republican nomination, facing congressmen Johnny Isakson and Mac Collins in the primary. Collins tried to paint Cain as a moderate, citing Cain's support for affirmative action programs, while Cain argued that he was a conservative, noting that he opposed the legality of abortion except when the mother's life is threatened. Cain finished second in the primary with 26.2% of the vote, ahead of Collins, who won 20.6%, but because Isakson won 53.2% of the vote, Isakson was able to avoid a runoff."}
{"text":"Starting in 2005, Cain worked for the political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) alongside Mark Block. Block would later become campaign manager for Cain's 2012 presidential run and would be joined in Cain's campaign by several other AFP employees. Cain continued to receive honoraria for speaking at AFP events until he announced his campaign for the Republican nomination. Cain's senior economic advisor during his 2012 presidential campaign, Rich Lowrie, who helped devise Cain's 9\u20139\u20139 tax plan, had served on the AFP board. In 2006, Cain voiced several radio ads encouraging people of color to vote Republican; the ads were funded by a group called America's PAC and its founder J. Patrick Rooney."}
{"text":"A Tea Party activist, Cain addressed numerous Tea Party rallies in 2010. Following the 2010 midterm elections, Cain announced his intentions to run for president in December 2010, stating that there was a 70% chance that he would attempt to seek the office. Later that month, he was the \"surprise choice\" for 2012 GOP nominee in a RedState.com reader poll. Cain announced the formation of an exploratory committee on January 12, 2011, before formally announcing his candidacy on May 21 in Atlanta."}
{"text":"Cain's addresses to conservative groups were well received, and in late September and early October 2011, Cain won the straw polls of the Florida Republican Party, TeaCon, and the National Federation of Republican Women's Convention. \"My focus groups have consistently picked Herman Cain as the most likeable candidate in the debates,\" said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. \"Don't underestimate the power of likability, even in a Republican primary. The more likeable the candidate, the greater the electoral potential.\""}
{"text":"Sexual harassment allegations and end of campaign."}
{"text":"In late October 2011, \"Politico\" reported that Cain had been accused by two women of sexual harassment and misconduct during his time as CEO of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s. Two other women made additional harassment accusations later on. Cain acknowledged that the restaurant organization made financial settlements to the complainants. Two of the four women came forward publicly: Sharon Bialek and Karen Kraushaar."}
{"text":"On November 28, 2011, Cain asserted that a woman named Ginger White claimed to have had an affair with him and that the allegation was not true. In an interview with White, which aired on the same day, she stated that the affair lasted 13 years and ended right before Cain announced his presidential campaign. On November 30, 2011, Cain denounced the allegations of sexual harassment and adultery at an event in Dayton, Ohio."}
{"text":"On December 3, 2011, Cain suspended his campaign. The sexual harassment claims were widely considered responsible for the sharp drop in his poll numbers."}
{"text":"According to a Pew Research Center report on December 21, 2011, Cain was the \"most covered candidate\" among the Republicans during that year."}
{"text":"For President Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address, the Tea Party Express chose Cain to give its second annual response. After Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gave the official GOP response, Cain delivered his speech at the National Press Club. The speech was streamed live on the Tea Party Express website. Cain referred to Obama's address as a \"hodgepodge of liberal ideas,\" adding that there were \"no big ideas that would impact job growth\" and \"no big ideas that would stimulate economic growth in this country.\""}
{"text":"Although Mitt Romney was endorsed by Cain on May 15, 2012, he would eventually lose the general election to President Obama. Cain then told Bryan Fischer that the Republican Party no longer represented the interests of conservatives in the United States and that it did not have \"the ability to rebrand itself.\" He asserted that \"a legitimate third party\" would be needed to replace it."}
{"text":"Cain married Gloria Etchison of Atlanta, soon after her graduation from Morris Brown College in 1968. The couple had two children, Melanie and Vincent, and four grandchildren."}
{"text":"Cain served as an associate minister at the Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta, which he joined at the age of 10. The church is part of the National Baptist Convention and is politically liberal and theologically conservative. The church's senior pastor, Rev. Cameron M. Alexander, did not share Cain's political philosophy."}
{"text":"Disclosures filed during Cain's 2011 campaign categorized his wealth at that time as being between $2.9 and $6.6 million, with Cain's combined income for both 2010 and 2011 being between $1.1 and $2.1 million."}
{"text":"In 2006, Cain was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, metastases to his liver, and a 30 percent chance of survival. After he underwent surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer was reported to be in remission."}
{"text":"Cain opposed masking mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. He attended the 2020 Trump Tulsa rally on June 20 and was photographed not wearing a face mask in a crowd who also were not wearing masks. On June 29, Cain tested positive for COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Georgia and was admitted to an Atlanta-area hospital two days later. On July 2, Cain's staff said there was \"no way of knowing for sure how or where\" he contracted the disease. Dan Calabrese, the editor of Cain's website, said, \"I realize people will speculate about the Tulsa rally, but Herman did a lot of traveling [that] week, including to Arizona where cases [were] spiking.\""}
{"text":"After four weeks of hospitalization, Cain died from COVID-19 complications on July 30, 2020, at the age of 74."}
{"text":"Brian Jhan Fox (born 1959) is an American computer programmer and free software advocate. He is the original author of the GNU Bash shell, which he announced as a beta in June 1989. He continued as the primary maintainer of bash until at least early 1993. Fox also built the first interactive online banking software in the U.S. for Wells Fargo in 1995, and he created an open source election system in 2008."}
{"text":"In 1985 Fox worked with Richard Stallman at Stallman's newly created Free Software Foundation. At the FSF, Fox authored GNU Bash, GNU Makeinfo, GNU Info, GNU Finger, GNU Echo and the readline and history libraries."}
{"text":"He was also the maintainer of GNU Emacs for a time, and made many contributions to the software that was created for the GNU Project between 1986 and 1994."}
{"text":"In 2008, Fox collaborated with Alan Dechert and Brent Turner to create a completely open source election system. The system was coded together with Parker Abercrombie, and demonstrated at the LinuxWorld conference in Moscone Center in San Francisco, August 5\u20137, 2008."}
{"text":"Fox also is a founding member of both the California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) and the National Association of Voting Officials (NAVO). These not-for-profit organizations promote open source voting systems for use in public elections. Fox co-wrote a \"New York Times\" piece in 2017 with former CIA head R. James Woolsey advocating open source election systems as a means of securing US elections against Russian interference."}
{"text":"Fox also wrote AMACS, a cut-down implementation of Emacs for the Apple II series."}
{"text":"He is the fourth born in a family of six siblings, composer and musician Donal Fox, Thaddeus Fox, sister Ena Fox, Daniel Fox and sister Sara Fox-Ray. He lives in Santa Barbara with longtime partner Lissa Liggett and their three children."}
{"text":"He is the son of physicist and educator Herbert Fox and grandson of artist Daniel Fox, creator of the Monopoly Man."}
{"text":"David George (c. 1742\u20131810) was an African-American Baptist preacher and a Black Loyalist from the American South who escaped to British lines in Savannah, Georgia; later he accepted transport to Nova Scotia and land there. He eventually resettled in Freetown, Sierra Leone."}
{"text":"With other slaves, George founded the Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina in 1775, the first black congregation in the present-day United States. He was later affiliated with the First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia. After migration, he founded Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Freetown, Sierra Leone. George wrote an account of his life that is one of the most important early slave narratives."}
{"text":"David George was born in Essex County, Virginia, in 1742 to African parents John and Judith, as the slave of a man called 'Chapel'. George ran away after witnessing his mother's horrible whipping. He also personally experienced a traumatic severe whipping. George received help to run away from some white travelers and worked for these men for some time. It was not until his master offered a reward for George that he ran away and worked for another white man whom he encountered (this time for many years). Because his master continued to pursue him, George migrated to South Carolina."}
{"text":"He was captured by a Creek Indian chief named Blue Salt. He considered George his prize and made him work. When George's owner found out that he was working for Blue Salt, he brought rum, linen and a gun to exchange for the slave, but Blue Salt refused to give him up. For several years, George worked for Creek and Natchez Indians."}
{"text":"George escaped and ran away again, this time encountering a Scottish trader named George Galphin (appears in some records as Gaulfin, Gaulphin), for whom he worked four years at Silver Bluff, South Carolina. Because of his close association with the Native Americans, Galphin had many slaves who had intermarried with the Creek."}
{"text":"George received help to read and write from the children of Galphin. He primarily used the Bible while learning how to read and write."}
{"text":"During this time, George met and married Phyllis, who was part Creek. Together they had four children born in what is now the United States. They had two more children born while in Nova Scotia, and four more children born in Sierra Leone."}
{"text":"In 1773 George met an old childhood friend and former slave, George Lisle, who had been converted to the Baptist faith. During the Great Awakening, Baptist preachers had traveled throughout the South, converting both whites and blacks, free and slave. Brother Palmer was a white Minister that uplifted and spread the word of God to David George and other Black people. Palmer was the start of the Church in Silver Bluff. Impressed with Liele's conversion, George, his wife and eight others were baptized at Silver Bluff. In 1775 George and eight other slaves formed one of the first African-American Baptist congregations in the United States."}
{"text":"A somewhat different account of George during these years is presented by Mark A. Noll, American church historian:"}
{"text":"\"The first continuing black church was the Silver Bluff Church in Aiken County, South Carolina, where an African-American preacher, David George (1742-1810), established a congregation around 1773 or 1774. George\u2019s pilgrimage marked him as one of the most remarkable religious figures of his century. After serving as a slave, he was converted through the influence of an-other slave named Cyrus. Soon George began to exhort his fellow bondsmen, an activity that led to his becoming, in effect, the pastor of the Silver Bluff Church. ... American patriots were trying to throw off the \"slavery\" of Parliament, but for those in chattel bondage like David George, the British were the agents who combated racial, chattel slavery.\""}
{"text":"Three years later during the American Revolutionary War, the slaves escaped to Savannah, where they gained freedom behind British lines, as they had occupied the city. George continued to minister to a Baptist congregation."}
{"text":"Several years later, the George family chose to migrate with other Black Loyalists to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the British provided some assistance in setting up a new colony and settlement in West Africa."}
{"text":"William Gwinn, his wife and daughter also emigrated to Sierra Leone. George founded the first Baptist church there. George was very influential; he was elected a \"tythingman\", a position of power in the colony at that time. George wrote a memoir that is considered one of the important slave narratives. He died in Freetown in 1810."}
{"text":"His descendants are part of the Sierra Leone Creole people of the Western Area of Freetown. Many of George's descendants belong to the Masonic Lodges of Sierra Leone. One of his descendants, also named David George, is a member of the organization \"Amistad Sankofa\", working to educate students about international issues and bridge the racial divide."}
{"text":"In August 2007, the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia and the Atlantic Baptist Convention had a joint convention and liturgy, to acknowledge earlier racism by the white convention, and seek reconciliation. They had had separate associations since the 19th century."}
{"text":"Jeffrey Banks is a fashion designer and author who has been described as a major black fashion maker."}
{"text":"Banks worked as a design assistant to Ralph Lauren (1971\u201373) and Calvin Klein (1973\u201376). He has claimed credit for Klein's logo garments, stating that he had the logo from a press folder silkscreened onto the sleeve of a brown T-shirt as a present for Klein. The gift was assumed by Barry K. Schwartz to be part of the upcoming line, and similar shirts formed the uniform for the front-of-house staff at Klein's next catwalk show, leading to the buyers asking to purchase them."}
{"text":"After leaving Calvin Klein, Banks launched his own-name label in New York City in 1977, according to his official website, although some sources state 1978."}
{"text":"By 1996, suits, shirts, eyewear and accessories from \"Jeffrey Banks Ltd.\" and \"Jeffrey Banks International\" were being sold worldwide with sales of about $20 million."}
{"text":"As an author, Jeffrey Banks has co-authored three fashion books with Doria de la Chapelle for Rizzoli, including a 2007 book on tartan, a 2011 book on the preppy style, and a 2015 book on the milliner Patricia Underwood. The second book led to Banks and de la Chapelle collaborating with Erica Lennard on \"Perry Ellis: an American original\", the first in-depth monograph on Banks's former friend and colleague, the designer Perry Ellis, published in 2013."}
{"text":"Florence \"Flo\" Anthony is a gossip columnist, syndicated radio host, TV contributor and author. She is an African-American reporter who writes for the gossip page of the \"Philadelphia Sun\". Anthony resides in the East Harlem section of New York City."}
{"text":"Florence Anthony is a graduate of Howard University."}
{"text":"After working as a publicist for sports legends like Muhammad Ali, Butch Lewis, Michael Spinks, Larry Holmes, Mike McCallum and Matthew Saad Muhammad; Anthony wrote in the mid-1980s entertainment news."}
{"text":"She became the first African-American reporter to work on the gossip column of the \"New York Post\", as well as the first African-American to pen a column in The National Examiner. An expert on everyone from Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson to Whitney Houston and Donald Trump, Anthony was a contributor on news magazine shows like Inside Edition, The Insider and Entertainment Tonight."}
{"text":"In the 1990s, Anthony became a gossip girl on \"The Ricky Lake Show\", The \"Rolonda Watts Show\", \"The Joan Rivers Show\", \"The Geraldo Show\", \"The Sally Jessy Raphael Show\", \"The Tempestt Bledsoe Show\", \"The Gordon Elliott Show\", \"Forgive or Forget\", \"The Leeza Gibbons Show\", \"The Danny Bonaduce Show\", \"The Bertice Berry Show\", \"The Mark Walberg Show\", \"The Vicki Lawrence Show\", and \"The Maury Povich Show\". She was also a guest on Court TV, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, CNN and HLN; and \"The Dini Petty Show\" and \"The Camilla Scott Show\"."}
{"text":"For six seasons, Anthony was a contributor and in time co-host of E! Entertainment's \"The Gossip Show\", a roundtable entertainment news show of gossip columnists. She also appeared on \"E! True Hollywood Story\" episodes on celebrities like La Toya Jackson, Robin Givens, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown and countless others."}
{"text":"Anthony continues to be a fixture in multimedia. With her own company, Dottie Media Group LLC, Anthony has two syndicated radio shows, \"Gossip To Go With Flo\" and \"Flo Anthony's Big Apple Buzz\", that are distributed in partnership with Superadio. The shows are heard by over 3 million listeners daily in upwards of 20 radio markets nationwide."}
{"text":"As a writer, Anthony is a regular contributor to the \"New York Daily News\", providing entertainment news stories for its popular Confidential column. The famed Hollywood insider also has a weekly syndicated column of her own that appears in \"The New York Amsterdam News\", \"Philadelphia Sunday Sun\", \"BRE Magazine\", \"Columbus Times\" and \"Oklahoma Eagle\". Anthony also heads up Steven Hoffenberg's PostPublishing.buzz website and is a contributing writer for \"Resident\"magazine. She is also the former publisher\/editor-in-chief of \"Black Noir\" magazine, as well as editor-in-chief of \"Black Elegance\" magazine."}
{"text":"On TV, she is regularly featured as a guest contributor on TV One (U.S. TV network)'s documentary series \"Unsung\" and \"Unsung: Hollywood.\" She also appeared for numerous seasons on TV One's now defunct series \"Life After\". Anthony can also be seen talking breaking news and celebrity culture on multiple cable news shows and local shows like \"Good Day New York\"."}
{"text":"As an author, Anthony made her debut in 2000 with her first novel, \"Keeping Secrets Telling Lies\" Her second tome came 13 years later in 2013, when she inked a book deal with Zane (author)'s Strebor Books to release \"Deadly Stuff Players.\" The sequel to that novel, \"One Last Deadly Pay\" was released in 2016 through W. Clark Distribution. Anthony regularly appears at book festivals and expos signing copies of her books."}
{"text":"She also handles personal appearances and publicity for boxing great Michael Spinks."}
{"text":"John Preston Davis (January 19, 1905 \u2013 September 11, 1973) was an American journalist, lawyer and activist intellectual, who became prominent for his work with the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR). In 1935 he co-founded the National Negro Congress, an organization dedicated to the advancement of African Americans during the Great Depression."}
{"text":"In 1946 he founded \"Our World\" magazine, a full-size, nationally distributed publication for African-American readers. He also published the \"American Negro Reference Book\", covering virtually every aspect of African-American life, present and past."}
{"text":"John P. Davis was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Dr. William Henry Davis and Julia Davis. His father was a graduate of Howard University and served as principal of Armstrong High School. During World War I, Dr. Davis was appointed as Secretary to Dr. Emmett Jay Scott, Special Assistant to the United States Secretary of War. In the 1920s, Dr. Davis served as Secretary to the Presidential Commission investigating the economic conditions in the Virgin Islands."}
{"text":"Davis attended segregated schools in Washington, D.C., graduating from the elite Dunbar High School, which stressed an academic curriculum. In 1922 he enrolled in Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He graduated in 1926, earning an A.B. and double honors in English and Psychology. At Bates, he was president of Delta Sigma Rho, an honorary debating fraternity, and editor of the student publication \"The Bobcat\". He enlisted the aid of Bates trustee Louis B. Costello, when Delta Sigma Rho's national council denied him membership because of his race."}
{"text":"Davis toured Europe with the Bates College debating team. He was among the first African-American men to be sent overseas under the auspices of the American University Union to engage in international debate; his team from Bates met and defeated Cambridge University. While an undergraduate at Bates College, Davis was nominated for a Rhodes scholarship. He contributed short stories to \"The Crisis\", official magazine of the NAACP, and \"\", published by the National Urban League. His short story \"The Overcoat\" was a prize-winner in \"Opportunity\"s 1926\u201327 literary contest."}
{"text":"With his literary interests, Davis was drawn into the Harlem Renaissance. After college, he moved to New York City, where for a time, he replaced the celebrated scholar W. E. B. Du Bois as literary editor of \"The Crisis\". During this period, Davis joined with other young black writers \u2013 Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce \u2013 to produce \"Fire!!\", a magazine devoted to young African-American artists."}
{"text":"Davis had a fellowship to Harvard University from 1926 to 1927, and earned his master's degree in Journalism. He left Harvard to join the staff of Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, where he served as Director of Publicity from (1927 to 1928). He returned to Harvard University and earned an LLB degree from Harvard Law School in 1933."}
{"text":"At Harvard, Davis cemented lifelong friendships with a small core of black students, including fellow Dunbar High School alumni Robert C. Weaver, later appointed as the first black member of a Presidential cabinet; William Hastie, later appointed as the first black federal judge; and Ralph Bunche, later a statesman and diplomat who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace."}
{"text":"These friends remained important to Davis throughout his career. During their student years, the men discussed race and politics, especially the inadequacy of the black Republican leadership. When the Great Depression intensified the social and economic problems confronting black America, Davis and his colleagues looked to the example of Reconstruction, when federal power was used to redress the plight of former slaves. They called on the federal government to ensure black civil and political rights. The New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to offer the possibility of federal intervention for economic justice."}
{"text":"Davis married Marguerite DeMond, the daughter of Reverend Abraham Lincoln DeMond and Lula Watkins (Patterson) DeMond. Marguerite had attended Avery Normal Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, operated by the American Missionary Association and the Congregationalist Church. Even before the Civil War, Avery Normal Institute's racially integrated faculty was providing quality educations for African Americans. She attended Syracuse University in 1931 and came to Washington, D.C., with her mother in 1932, after the death of her father."}
{"text":"Marguerite DeMond went to work as a researcher for African-American historian Carter G. Woodson's Association for the Study of African American Life and History. After a one-year courtship, she and Davis were married. They had four children, including Michael DeMond Davis, who became a journalist and author of \"Black American Women in Olympic Track and Field\" and the Thurgood Marshall biography."}
{"text":"In the summer of 1933 John P. Davis, a law graduate, and Robert C. Weaver, a doctoral student at Harvard, acted to ensure that African-American interests were represented in government programs. The two men returned to Washington, D.C. and established an office on Capitol Hill, where they fought successfully against the racial wage differential and for the integration of Negro families into the program of the Homestead Subsistence Division in the first recovery program."}
{"text":"Davis and Weaver organized the Negro Industrial League to pressure New Deal agencies to address the needs of blacks. They monitored the hearings of the National Recovery Administration to ensure that blacks benefited from the program."}
{"text":"Their efforts led to the establishment of the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR), a group of 26 national groups, including the YWCA, National Urban League (NUL), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Davis became Executive Secretary of the JCNR, a position he held until 1936, serving as a legislative lobbyist. The committee lobbied for fair inclusion of African Americans in government-sponsored programs. It publicized incidents and patterns of racial discrimination. The implementation of a National Recovery Program promised to have immediate and long-term consequences for African Americans. While Davis and Weaver worked, more established African-American leaders deliberated about how to respond to the flurry of New Deal legislation."}
{"text":"In May 1935 a conference on the economic status of the Negro was held at Howard University in Washington, D.C., out of which emerged a major civil rights coalition that was active in the late 1930s and 1940s: the National Negro Congress (NNC)\u2014whose sponsors included Davis, Ralph J. Bunche and Alain Locke of Howard University, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Ford of the Communist Party USA, Lester Granger and Elmer Carter of the Urban League, and Charles Hamilton Houston of the NAACP. Davis was one of the original founders; he served as Executive Secretary until 1942."}
{"text":"The NNC represented one of the first efforts of the 20th century to bring together under one umbrella black secular leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, radicals, and professional politicians, with the assumption that the common denominator of race could weld together such divergent segments of black society. It was the Communist Party\u2019s effort to build support among activists in the black mainstream. The evolution of the NNC dramatized the growing convergence of outlook between Communists and activist black intellectuals that had taken shape in the protests of the early Depression years and reached full fruition during the years of the Popular Front."}
{"text":"In 1943 Davis brought the first lawsuit challenging segregated schools in Washington, D.C., in the name of his five-year-old son Michael D. Davis, who was rejected from his neighborhood's Noyes School, a white elementary school. The \"Washington Star\" newspaper criticized the African-American lawyer for legally challenging the District's dual segregated school system after the principal of Noyes School refused to admit Mike Davis. The \"Washington Star\" said that District citizens had long accepted separate schools for blacks and whites, and that the suit brought by John P. Davis would cause deeper racial divisions in the nation's capital."}
{"text":"In response to Davis' suit, the US Congress appropriated federal funds to construct the Lucy D. Slowe elementary school, for African-American children, directly across the street from his Brookland neighborhood home. At that time, a committee of Congress directly administered District government."}
{"text":"After World War II, in 1946 Davis was founding publisher of \"Our World\" magazine, a full-size, nationally distributed magazine to appeal to African-American readers. Its first issue, with singer-actress Lena Horne on the cover, appeared on the nation's newsstands in April 1946. \"Our World\" was a premier publication, covering contemporary topics from black history to sports and entertainment, with regular articles on health, fashion, politics and social awareness. It was based in New York City, the publishing capital of the country."}
{"text":"\"Our World\" portrayed a thriving black America; its covers featured entertainers such as Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole. The magazine ceased publication in 1957."}
{"text":"In 1964 Davis served as editor of special publications for the Phelps-Stokes Fund. He compiled in a single volume a reliable summary on the main aspects of Negro life in America, presenting it with historical depth to provide the reader with a true perspective. \"The American Negro Reference Book\" covered virtually every aspect of African-American life, present and past."}
{"text":"The largest collection of Davis' papers is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Insight into Davis' political and social views can be found in his own writings. \"The Papers of the National Negro Congress\" reproduces all of the organization\u2019s records that are housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, including the voluminous working files of Davis and successive executive secretaries of the National Negro Congress. Beginning with papers from 1933 that predate the formation of the National Negro Congress, the wide-ranging collection documents Davis\u2019 involvement in the Negro Industrial League. It includes the \"Report Files\" of Davis\u2019 interest in the \"Negro problem.\""}
{"text":"The most extensive overview of Davis' life is by Hilmar Jenson in an edition of his writings, John Preston Davis, \"The Forgotten Civil Rights\" (1996). Much of the scholarly writing about Davis focuses on his experiences in the National Negro Congress."}
{"text":"Artifacts and papers of Davis are being acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African-American History and Culture."}
{"text":"John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 \u2013 March 25, 2009) was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work \"From Slavery to Freedom\", first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor."}
{"text":"Born in Oklahoma, Franklin attended Fisk University and then Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1941. He was a professor at Howard University, and in 1956 was named to head the history department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. Recruited to the University of Chicago in 1964, he eventually led the history department and was appointed to a named chair. He then moved to Duke University in 1983, as an appointee to a named chair in history."}
{"text":"Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin (1879\u20131957) and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University."}
{"text":"Franklin's father Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, aka \"Amazing Buck Franklin.\" He was of African-American and Choctaw ancestry and born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory (formerly Pickens County). He was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a former slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and three-fourths African-American ancestry. Buck Franklin became a lawyer."}
{"text":"John Hope Franklin graduated from Booker T. Washington High School (then segregated) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated in 1935 from Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, then earned a master's in 1936 and a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University."}
{"text":"\"My challenge,\" Franklin said, \"was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.\""}
{"text":"In his autobiography, Franklin has described a series of formative incidents in which he confronted racism while seeking to volunteer his services at the beginning of the Second World War. He responded to the navy's search for qualified clerical workers, but after he presented his extensive qualifications, the navy recruiter told him that he was the wrong color for the position. He was similarly unsuccessful in finding a position with a War Department historical project. When he went to have a blood test, as required for the draft, the doctor initially refused to allow him into his office. Afterward, Franklin took steps to avoid the draft, on the basis that the country did not respect him or have an interest in his well-being, because of his color."}
{"text":"In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team led by Thurgood Marshall, and helped develop the sociological case for \"Brown v. Board of Education\". This case, challenging \"de jure\" segregated education in the South, was taken to the United States Supreme Court. It ruled in 1954 that the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional, leading to integration of schools."}
{"text":"Franklin's teaching career began at Fisk University. During WWII, he taught at St. Augustine's College from 1939 to 1943 and the North Carolina College for Negroes, currently North Carolina Central University from 1943 to 1947."}
{"text":"From 1947 to 1956, he taught at Howard University. In 1956, Franklin was selected to chair the history department at Brooklyn College, the first person of color to head a major history department. Franklin served there until 1964, when he was recruited by the University of Chicago. He spent 1962 as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge, holding the Professorship of American History and Institutions."}
{"text":"David Levering Lewis, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for history, said that while he was deciding to become a historian, he learned that Franklin, his mentor, had been named departmental chairman at Brooklyn College."}
{"text":"Now that certainly is a distinction. It had never happened before that a person of color had chaired a major history department. That meant a lot to me. If I had doubt about (the) viability of a career in history, that example certainly helped put to rest such concerns."}
{"text":"In researching his prize-winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, Lewis said he became aware of Franklin's"}
{"text":"From 1964 through 1968, Franklin was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and chair of the department from 1967 to 1970. He was named to the endowed position of John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, which he held from 1969 to 1982. He was appointed to the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, 1962\u20131969, and was its chair from 1966 to 1969."}
{"text":"In 1976, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Franklin for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Franklin's three-part lecture became the basis for his book \"Racial Equality in America.\""}
{"text":"Franklin was appointed to the U.S. Delegation to the UNESCO General Conference, Belgrade (1980)."}
{"text":"In 1983, Franklin was appointed as the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University. In 1985, he took emeritus status from this position. During this same year, he helped to establish the Durham Literacy Center and served on its Board until his death in 2009."}
{"text":"Franklin was also Professor of Legal History at the Duke University Law School from 1985 to 1992."}
{"text":"In 2005, at the age of 90, Franklin published and lectured on his new autobiography, \"Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin\". In 2006, \"Mirror to America\" received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award, which is given annually to honor authors \"whose writing, in illuminating past or present injustice, acts as a beacon towards a more just society.\""}
{"text":"In 2006, he also received the John W. Kluge Prize and as the recipient lectured on the successes and failures of race relations in America in \"Where do We Go from Here?\" In 2008, Franklin endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama."}
{"text":"Franklin died at Duke University Medical Center on the morning of March 25, 2009."}
{"text":"In 1991, Franklin's students honored him with a festschrift \"The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin\" (edited by Eric Anderson & Alfred A. Moss, Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1991)."}
{"text":"Franklin served as president of the American Historical Association (1979), the American Studies Association (1967), the Southern Historical Association (1970), and the Organization of American Historians (1975). He was a member of the board of trustees at Fisk University, the Chicago Public Library, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association."}
{"text":"Franklin was elected as a foundation member of Fisk's new chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1953, when Fisk became the first historically black college to have a chapter of the honor society. In 1973\u20131976, he served as President of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa."}
{"text":"Additionally, Franklin was appointed to serve on national commissions, including the National Council on the Humanities, the President's Advisory Commission on Ambassadorial Appointments, and One America: The President's Initiative on Race."}
{"text":"Franklin was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He was an early beneficiary of the fraternity's Foundation Publishers, which provides financial support and fellowship for writers addressing African-American issues."}
{"text":"In 1962, honored as an outstanding historian, Franklin became the first black member of the exclusive Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C."}
{"text":"The John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture resides at Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and contains his personal and professional papers. The archive is one of three academic units named after Franklin at Duke. The others are the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, which opened in February 2001 and the Franklin Humanities Institute. Franklin had previously rejected Duke's offer to name a center for African-American Studies after him, saying that he was a historian of America and the world, too."}
{"text":"In 1975, he was awarded the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates."}
{"text":"In 1975, Franklin was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree from Whittier College."}
{"text":"In 1978, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame."}
{"text":"In 1994, the Society of American Historians (founded by Allan Nevins and other historians to encourage literary distinction in the writing of history) awarded Franklin its Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement."}
{"text":"In 1995, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP."}
{"text":"In 1995, President Clinton awarded Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The President's remarks upon presentation of the medal cited Franklin's lifelong work as a teacher and a student of history, seeking to bring about better understanding regarding relations between whites and blacks in modern times."}
{"text":"In 1995, he received the Chicago History Museum \"Making History Award\" for Distinction in Historical Scholarship."}
{"text":"In 1996, Franklin received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement."}
{"text":"In 1997, Franklin was selected to receive the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, a career literary award given annually by the Tulsa Library Trust. Franklin was the first (and so far only) native Oklahoman to receive the award. During his visit to Tulsa to accept the award, Franklin made several appearances to speak about his childhood experiences with racial segregation, as well as his father's experiences as a lawyer in the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa race riot."}
{"text":"In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Franklin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans."}
{"text":"Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry presented the Governor's Arts Award to Dr. Franklin in 2004."}
{"text":"In 2005, Franklin received the North Caroliniana Society Award for \"long and distinguished service in the encouragement, production, enhancement, promotion, and preservation of North Caroliniana.\""}
{"text":"On May 20, 2006, Franklin was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters at Lafayette College's 171st Commencement Exercises."}
{"text":"On November 15, 2006, John Hope Franklin was announced as the third recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity. He shared the prize with Yu Ying-shih."}
{"text":"On October 27, 2010, the City of Tulsa renamed Reconciliation Park, established to commemorate the victims of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, as John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in his honor. It includes a 27-foot bronze entitled \"Tower of Reconciliation\" by sculptor Ed Dwight, expressing the long history of Africans in Oklahoma."}
{"text":"On November 2, 2019, Franklin was recognized as a Main Honoree by the Sesquicentennial Honors Commission at the Durham 150 Closing Ceremony in Durham, NC on November 2, 2019. The posthumous recognition was bestowed upon 29 individuals \"whose dedication, accomplishments and passion have helped shape Durham in important ways."}
{"text":"Franklin married Aurelia Whittington on June 11, 1940. She was a librarian. Their only child, John Whittington Franklin, was born August 24, 1952. Their marriage lasted 59 years, until January 27, 1999, when Aurelia succumbed to a long illness."}
{"text":". Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963; 2nd edn. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1993."}
{"text":"Michael Arceneaux (born April 12, 1984) is an American writer. He is the author of the 2018 essay collection \"I Can't Date Jesus\", a \"New York Times\" bestselling book. His second book is entitled \"I Don't Want to Die Poor\" (2020)."}
{"text":"Michael Joseph Arceneaux was born April 12, 1984, in Houston, Texas, to a working-class Black family from Louisiana. His mother, a registered nurse, was a devout Catholic and Arceneaux was raised in the church, even briefly considering the priesthood."}
{"text":"Arceneaux, from the Hiram Clarke community, attended Madison High School in Houston, then, on a combination of scholarships and student loans, enrolled at Howard University, where he majored in broadcast journalism and wrote for campus newspaper \"The Hilltop\". He graduated in 2007, becoming the first man in his family to graduate from college."}
{"text":"After college, Arceneaux moved to Los Angeles where he began his writing career. He has written for \"The Guardian\", \"New York\" magazine, \"Essence\", \"Rolling Stone\", \"Teen Vogue\", \"BuzzFeed\", Vulture\", The Washington Post,\" \"The New York Times\" and \"XOJane\", as well as writing an advice column, called \"Dearly Beloved\", at \"Into\"."}
{"text":"Reviewers have compared Arceneaux's essay collection to the work of Roxane Gay, David Sedaris, and Samantha Irby. In \"Vogue\", Chloe Schama and Bridget Read noted Arceneaux's \"hysterically funny, vulnerable\" style, calling the collection \"a triumph of self-exploration, tinged with but not overburdened by his reckoning with our current political moment...The result is a piece of personal and cultural storytelling that is as fun as it is illuminating.\""}
{"text":"Arceneaux's second book, \"I Don't Want to Die Poor\" (2020), expands on his essay for \"The New York Times\" describing his private student loan debt."}
{"text":"Herb Boyd (born November 1, 1938) is an American journalist, educator, author, and activist. His articles appear regularly in the \"New York Amsterdam News\". He teaches black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New Rochelle."}
{"text":"Boyd was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He met Malcolm X in 1958 and credits him as an inspiration: \"[Malcolm] set me on the path to become the writer-activist I am, to try to live up to the very ennobling things that he represented.\""}
{"text":"Boyd attended Wayne State University. During the late 1960s, he helped establish the first black studies classes there and went on to teach at the university for 12 years. He also co-developed and instructed the initial curriculum in jazz studies at the Oberlin Conservatory."}
{"text":"In addition to the \"Amsterdam News\", Boyd's work has been published in \"The Black Scholar\", \"The City Sun\", \"Down Beat\", \"Emerge\", and \"Essence\". He has been recognized with awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the New York Association of Black Journalists. In 2014, the National Association of Black Journalists inducted Boyd into its Hall of Fame."}
{"text":"\"Brotherman\", which Boyd co-edited with Robert L. Allen, was given the 1995 American Book Award. His biography \"Baldwin's Harlem\" was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2009."}
{"text":"Boyd was managing editor of The Black World Today, a now-defunct online news service."}
{"text":"Marimba Ani (born Dona Richards) is an anthropologist and African Studies scholar best known for her work \"Yurugu\", a comprehensive critique of European thought and culture, and her coining of the term \"Maafa\" for the African holocaust."}
{"text":"Marimba Ani completed her BA degree at the University of Chicago, and holds MA and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School University. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, she served as an SNCC field secretary, and married civil-rights activist Bob Moses; they divorced in 1966. She has taught as a Professor of African Studies in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York City, and is credited with introducing the term Maafa to describe the African holocaust."}
{"text":"Ani's 1994 work, \"Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior\", examined the influence of European culture on the formation of modern institutional frameworks, through colonialism and imperialism, from an African perspective. Described by the author as an \"intentionally aggressive polemic\", the book derives its title from a Dogon legend of an incomplete and destructive being rejected by its creator."}
{"text":"Examining the causes of global white supremacy, Ani argued that European thought implicitly believes in its own superiority, stating: \"European culture is unique in the assertion of political interest\"."}
{"text":"In \"Yurugu\", Ani proposed a tripartite conceptualization of culture, based on the concepts of"}
{"text":"The terms Ani uses in this framework are based on Swahili. \"Asili\" is a common Swahili word meaning \"origin\" or \"essence\"; \"utamawazo\" and \"utamaroho\" are neologisms created by Ani, based on the Swahili words \"utamaduni\" (\"civilisation\"), \"wazo\" (\"thought\") and \"roho\" (\"spirit life\"). The \"utamawazo\" and \"utamaroho\" are not viewed as separate from the \"asili\", but as its manifestations, which are \"born out of the \"asili\" and, in turn, affirm it.\""}
{"text":"Ani characterised the \"asili\" of European culture as dominated by the concepts of separation and control, with separation establishing dichotomies like \"man\" and \"nature\", \"the European\" and \"the other\", \"thought\" and \"emotion\" \u2013 separations that in effect end up negating the existence of \"the other\", who or which becomes subservient to the needs of (European) man. Control is disguised in universalism as in reality \"the use of abstract 'universal' formulations in the European experience has been to control people, to impress them, and to intimidate them.\""}
{"text":"According to Ani's model, the \"utamawazo\" of European culture \"is structured by ideology and bio-cultural experience\", and its \"utamaroho\" or vital force is domination, reflected in all European-based structures and the imposition of Western values and civilisation on peoples around the world, destroying cultures and languages in the name of progress."}
{"text":"The book also addresses the use of the term Maafa, based on a Swahili word meaning \"great disaster\", to describe slavery. African-centered thinkers have subsequently popularized and expanded on Ani's conceptualization. Citing both the centuries-long history of slavery and more recent examples like the Tuskegee study, Ani argued that Europeans and white \"Americans\" have an \"enormous capacity for the perpetration of physical violence against other cultures\" that had resulted in \"antihuman, genocidal\" treatment of blacks."}
{"text":"Philip Higgs, in \"African Voices in Education\", describes \"Yurugu\" as an \"excellent delineation of the ethics of harmonious coexistence between human beings\", but cites the book's \"overlooking of structures of social inequality and conflict that one finds in all societies, including indigenous ones,\" as a weakness. Molefi Kete Asante describes \"Yurugu\" as an \"elegant work\". Stephen Howe accuses Ani of having little interest in actual Africa (beyond romance) and challenges her critique of \"Eurocentric\" logic since she invests heavily in its usage in the book."}
{"text":"Kandia Crazy Horse is an American country musician, rock critic and writer. She has written for \"The Village Voice\", is the editor of \"Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock 'n' Roll,\" and also writes for \"Creative Loafing,\" and \"The Guardian\". Her country music debut, \"Stampede\", was released in 2013. Crazy Horse is based in New York."}
{"text":"When Crazy Horse began as a music journalist, she states that she was considered a \"novelty\" because \"a black, young female wasn't the picture of a rock critic.\" Her work as a rock critic is feminist in tone and often focuses on Southern rock. She has also emphasized black contributions to rock music."}
{"text":"Crazy Horse edited \"Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock 'n' Roll\" (2004)\".\" The collection of essays analyzed black figures in rock in order to bring to light the \"black experience in rock 'n' roll.\" \"Rip It Up\" describes how black rock isn't considered part of the black music scene and therefore its \"impact has been minimized.\""}
{"text":"She received an Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies from Princeton University during 2008 and 2009. While she was a fellow at Princeton, she taught the course \"Roll Over Beethoven: Black Rock and Cultural Revolt.\""}
{"text":"Crazy Horse's debut album, \"Stampede\", contains original songs by Crazy Horse and cover songs. The style of music on the record is traditional country music. \"Acoustic Guitar\" called her album \"stunning\" and a \"powerful musical debut.\" \"Blurt\" called her voice \"sweet and soulful\" and praised her writing that revitalizes familiar country music sounds."}
{"text":"Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic and author. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and is a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, race, and the US prison system."}
{"text":"Davis has received various awards, including the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize. Accused of supporting political violence, she has sustained criticism from the highest levels of the US government. She has also been criticized for supporting the Soviet Union and its satellites. Davis has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 2020 she was listed as the 1971 \"Woman of the Year\" in \"Time\" magazine's \"100 Women of the Year\" edition, which covered the 100 years that began with women's suffrage in 1920. Davis is included in \"Time\" 100 Most Influential People of 2020."}
{"text":"Angela Davis was born on January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her family lived in the \"Dynamite Hill\" neighborhood, which was marked in the 1950s by the bombings of houses in an attempt to intimidate and drive out middle-class black people who had moved there. Davis occasionally spent time on her uncle's farm and with friends in New York City. Her siblings include two brothers, Ben and Reginald, and a sister, Fania. Ben played defensive back for the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions in the late 1960s and early 1970s."}
{"text":"Davis attended Carrie A. Tuggle School, a segregated black elementary school, and later, Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. During this time, Davis's mother, Sallye Bell Davis, was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization influenced by the Communist Party aimed at building alliances among African Americans in the South. Davis grew up surrounded by communist organizers and thinkers, who significantly influenced her intellectual development."}
{"text":"Davis was involved in her church youth group as a child, and attended Sunday school regularly. She attributes much of her political involvement to her involvement with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. She also participated in the Girl Scouts 1959 national roundup in Colorado. As a Girl Scout, she marched and picketed to protest racial segregation in Birmingham."}
{"text":"By her junior year of high school, Davis had been accepted by an American Friends Service Committee (Quaker) program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village. There she was recruited by a Communist youth group, Advance."}
{"text":"Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her class. She encountered the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse at a rally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and became his student. In a 2007 television interview, Davis said, \"Herbert Marcuse taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.\" She worked part-time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland and attended the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki. She returned home in 1963 to a Federal Bureau of Investigation interview about her attendance at the Communist-sponsored festival."}
{"text":"During her second year at Brandeis, Davis decided to major in French and continued her intensive study of philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. She was accepted by the Hamilton College Junior Year in France Program. Classes were initially at Biarritz and later at the Sorbonne. In Paris, she and other students lived with a French family. She was in Biarritz when she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, in which four black girls were killed. She grieved deeply as she was personally acquainted with the victims."}
{"text":"While completing her degree in French, Davis realized that her primary area of interest was philosophy. She was particularly interested in Marcuse's ideas. On returning to Brandeis, she sat in on his course. She wrote in her autobiography that Marcuse was approachable and helpful. She began making plans to attend the University of Frankfurt for graduate work in philosophy. In 1965, she graduated \"magna cum laude\", a member of Phi Beta Kappa."}
{"text":"In Germany, with a monthly stipend of $100, she lived first with a German family and later with a group of students in a loft in an old factory. After visiting East Berlin during the annual May Day celebration, she felt that the East German government was dealing better with the residual effects of fascism than were the West Germans. Many of her roommates were active in the radical Socialist German Student Union (SDS), and Davis participated in some SDS actions. Events in the United States, including the formation of the Black Panther Party and the transformation of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to an all-black organization, drew her interest upon her return."}
{"text":"Marcuse had moved to a position at the University of California, San Diego, and Davis followed him there after her two years in Frankfurt. Davis traveled to London to attend a conference on \"The Dialectics of Liberation\". The black contingent at the conference included the Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael and the British Michael X. Although moved by Carmichael's rhetoric, Davis was reportedly disappointed by her colleagues' black nationalist sentiments and their rejection of communism as a \"white man's thing.\""}
{"text":"She joined the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party USA named for international Communist sympathizers and leaders Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, of Cuba and the Congo, respectively."}
{"text":"Davis earned a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1968. She earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Humboldt University in East Berlin."}
{"text":"Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, 1969\u201370."}
{"text":"Beginning in 1969, Davis was an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Although both Princeton and Swarthmore had tried to recruit her, she opted for UCLA because of its urban location. At that time she was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party USA, and an affiliate of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Black Panther Party."}
{"text":"Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates who were convicted of killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison."}
{"text":"As California considers \"all persons concerned in the commission of a crime, [\u2026] whether they directly commit the act constituting the offense, or aid and abet in its commission, [\u2026] are principals in any crime so committed\", Davis was charged with \"aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder in the death of Judge Harold Haley\", and Marin County Superior Court Judge Peter Allen Smith issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours after the judge issued the warrant on August 14, 1970, a massive attempt to find and arrest Davis began. On August 18, four days after the warrant was issued, the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover listed Davis on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List; she was the third woman and the 309th person to be listed."}
{"text":"Soon after, Davis became a fugitive and fled California. According to her autobiography, during this time she hid in friends' homes and moved at night. On October 13, 1970, FBI agents found her at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City. President Richard M. Nixon congratulated the FBI on its \"capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.\""}
{"text":"On January 5, 1971, Davis appeared at Marin County Superior Court and declared her innocence before the court and nation: \"I now declare publicly before the court, before the people of this country that I am innocent of all charges which have been leveled against me by the state of California.\" John Abt, general counsel of the Communist Party USA, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shootings."}
{"text":"While being held in the Women's Detention Center, Davis was initially segregated from other prisoners, in solitary confinement. With the help of her legal team, she obtained a federal court order to get out of the segregated area."}
{"text":"Across the nation, thousands of people began organizing a movement to gain her release. In New York City, black writers formed a committee called the Black People in Defense of Angela Davis. By February 1971 more than 200 local committees in the United States, and 67 in foreign countries, worked to free Davis from prison. John Lennon and Yoko Ono contributed to this campaign with the song \"Angela\". In 1972, after a 16-month incarceration, the state allowed her release on bail from county jail. On February 23, 1972, Rodger McAfee, a dairy farmer from Fresno, California, paid her $100,000 bail with the help of Steve Sparacino, a wealthy business owner. The United Presbyterian Church paid some of her legal defense expenses."}
{"text":"A defense motion for a change of venue was granted, and the trial was moved to Santa Clara County. On June 4, 1972, after 13 hours of deliberations, the all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was judged insufficient to establish her role in the plot. She was represented by Leo Branton Jr., who hired psychologists to help the defense determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, a technique that has since become more common. He also hired experts to discredit the reliability of eyewitness accounts."}
{"text":"In 1971 the CIA estimated that five percent of Soviet propaganda efforts were directed towards the Angela Davis campaign. In August 1972, Davis visited the USSR at the invitation of the Central Committee, and received an honorary doctorate from Moscow State University."}
{"text":"On May 1, 1979, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union. She visited Moscow later that month to accept the prize, where she praised \"the glorious name\" of Lenin and the \"great October Revolution\"."}
{"text":"In the mid-1970s, Jim Jones, who developed the cult Peoples Temple, initiated friendships with progressive leaders in the San Francisco area including Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement AIM and Davis. On September 10, 1977, 14 months before the Temple's mass murder-suicide, Davis spoke via amateur radio telephone \"patch\" to members of his Peoples Temple living in Jonestown in Guyana. In her statement during the \"Six Day Siege\", she expressed support for the People's Temple anti-racism efforts and told members there was a conspiracy against them. She said, \"When you are attacked, it is because of your progressive stand, and we feel that it is directly an attack against us as well.\""}
{"text":"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and political prisoners in socialist countries."}
{"text":"Davis taught a women's studies course at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978, and was a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the San Francisco State University from at least 1980 to 1984. She was a professor in the History of Consciousness and the Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Rutgers University from 1991 to 2008. Since then, she has been Distinguished Professor Emerita."}
{"text":"Davis was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Syracuse University in Spring 1992 and October 2010, and was the Randolph Visiting Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Vassar College in 1995."}
{"text":"In 2014, Davis returned to UCLA as a Regents' Lecturer. She delivered a public lecture on May 8 in Royce Hall, where she had given her first lecture 45 years earlier."}
{"text":"In 2016, Davis was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in Healing and Social Justice from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco during its 48th annual commencement ceremony."}
{"text":"Davis is a major figure in the prison abolition movement. She has called the United States prison system the \"prison\u2013industrial complex\" and was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison system. In recent works, she has argued that the US prison system resembles a new form of slavery, pointing to the disproportionate share of the African-American population who were incarcerated. Davis advocates focusing social efforts on education and building \"engaged communities\" to solve various social problems now handled through state punishment."}
{"text":"As early as 1969, Davis began public speaking engagements. She expressed her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the prison\u2013industrial complex, and her support of gay rights and other social justice movements. In 1969, she blamed imperialism for the troubles oppressed populations suffer:"}
{"text":"We are facing a common enemy and that enemy is Yankee Imperialism, which is killing us both here and abroad. Now I think anyone who would try to separate those struggles, anyone who would say that in order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we have to leave all of these other outlying issues out of the picture, is playing right into the hands of the enemy, she declared."}
{"text":"She has continued lecturing throughout her career, including at numerous universities."}
{"text":"In 2001 she publicly spoke against the war on terror following the 9\/11 attacks, continued to criticize the prison\u2013industrial complex, and discussed the broken immigration system. She said that to solve social justice issues, people must \"hone their critical skills, develop them and implement them.\" Later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she declared that the \"horrendous situation in New Orleans\" was due to the country's structural racism, capitalism, and imperialism."}
{"text":"Davis opposed the 1995 Million Man March, arguing that the exclusion of women from this event promoted male chauvinism. She said that Louis Farrakhan and other organizers appeared to prefer that women take subordinate roles in society. Together with Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw and others, she formed the African American Agenda 2000, an alliance of black feminists."}
{"text":"Davis has continued to oppose the death penalty. In 2003, she lectured at Agnes Scott College, a liberal arts women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, on prison reform, minority issues, and the ills of the criminal justice system."}
{"text":"On October 31, 2011, Davis spoke at the Philadelphia and Washington Square Occupy Wall Street assemblies. Due to restrictions on electronic amplification, her words were human microphoned. In 2012 Davis was awarded the 2011 Blue Planet Award, an award given for contributions to humanity and the planet."}
{"text":"At the 27th Empowering Women of Color Conference in 2012, Davis said she was a vegan. She has called for the release of Rasmea Odeh, associate director at the Arab American Action Network, who was convicted of immigration fraud in relation to her hiding of a previous murder conviction."}
{"text":"Davis supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel."}
{"text":"Davis was an honorary co-chair of the January 21, 2017, Women's March on Washington, which occurred the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. The organizers' decision to make her a featured speaker was criticized from the right by Humberto Fontova and \"National Review\". Libertarian journalist Cathy Young wrote that Davis's \"long record of support for political violence in the United States and the worst of human rights abusers abroad\" undermined the march."}
{"text":"On October 16, 2018, Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, presented Davis with an honorary degree during the inaugural Viola Desmond Legacy Lecture, as part of the institution's bicentennial celebration year."}
{"text":"On January 7, 2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) rescinded Davis's Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, saying she \"does not meet all of the criteria\". Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin and others cited criticism of Davis's vocal support for Palestinian rights and the movement to boycott Israel. Davis said her loss of the award was \"not primarily an attack against me but rather against the very spirit of the indivisibility of justice.\" On January 25, the BCRI reversed its decision and issued a public apology, stating that there should have been more public consultation."}
{"text":"In November 2019, along with other public figures, Davis signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as \"a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world\", and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election."}
{"text":"On January 20, 2020, Davis gave the Memorial Keynote Address at the University of Michigan's MLK Symposium."}
{"text":"Davis was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021."}
{"text":"From 1980 to 1983 Davis was married to Hilton Braithwaite. In 1997, she came out as a lesbian in an interview with \"Out\" magazine. As of 2020, Davis was living with her life partner Gina Dent, a fellow humanities scholar and intersectional feminist researcher at UC Santa Cruz, who together with Davis advocates for Black liberation, Palestinian solidarity, and the abolition of police and prisons."}
{"text":"On January 28, 1972, Garrett Brock Trapnell hijacked TWA Flight 2. One of his demands was Davis's release."}
{"text":"In Renato Guttuso's painting \"The Funerals of Togliatti\" (1972), Davis is depicted, among other figures of communism, in the left framework, near the author's self-portrait, Elio Vittorini, and Jean-Paul Sartre."}
{"text":"In 1971, black playwright Elvie Moore wrote the play \"Angela is Happening\", depicting Davis on trial with figures such as Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and H. Rap Brown as eyewitnesses proclaiming her innocence. The play was performed at the Inner City Cultural Center and at UCLA, with Pat Ballard as Davis."}
{"text":"The documentary \"Angela Davis: Portrait of a Revolutionary\" (1972) was directed by UCLA Film School student Yolande du Luart. It follows Davis from 1969 to 1970, documenting her dismissal from UCLA. The film wrapped shooting before the Marin County incident."}
{"text":"In the movie \"Network\" (1976), Marlene Warfield's character Laureen Hobbs appears to be modeled on Davis."}
{"text":"Also in 2018, a cotton T-shirt with Davis's face on it was featured in Prada's 2018 collection."}
{"text":"A mural featuring Davis was painted by Italian street artist Jorit Agoch in the Scampia neighborhood of Naples in 2019."}
{"text":"In 2019, Julie Dash, who is credited as the first black female director to have a theatrical release of a film (\"Daughters of the Dust\") in the US, announced that she would be directing a film based on Davis's life."}
{"text":"Dr. Rovenia M. Brock, also known as Dr. Ro, is an American nutritionist, lecturer, health reporter, entrepreneur, and author."}
{"text":"Brock made her television debut as host of BET's \"Heart and Soul\". She worked as a nutrition coach on \"The View,\" helping co-host Sherri Shepherd lose 41 pounds.She is currently a nutritional adviser on \"The Dr. Oz Show\"."}
{"text":"Brock partnered with McDonald's in 2005, to promote physical activity."}
{"text":"Brock is nutrition contributor to National Public Radio (NPR)."}
{"text":"She launched a podcast, \"Dr. Ro on Demand\", in 2019."}
{"text":"Brock was executive producer, creator and host of \"Dr. Ro's Fit Kidz\", a health and fitness children's DVD series.l"}
{"text":"Gene Demby is an American journalist. He is lead blogger on NPR\u2019s race, ethnicity and culture team Code Switch and cohost of the podcast by the same title. He's also the founder of the blog PostBourgie and its accompanying podcast."}
{"text":"Demby grew up in South Philadelphia, and attended Hofstra University."}
{"text":"Prior to joining NPR, Demby worked for \"The New York Times\" and then as managing editor for \"Huffington Post's\" BlackVoices vertical."}
{"text":"Demby debuted the NPR project Code Switch on April 7, 2013 with an introductory essay that met with immediate acclaim; writing at \"Complex\", Jason Parham said that if the essay \"'How Code-Switching Explains The World' is any indication of the content to come, we couldn't be more excited.\""}
{"text":"In 2016, Demby and cohost Shereen Marisol Meraji debuted what Harvard's Neiman Lab called \"the long-awaited podcast\" from Code Switch."}
{"text":"Demby hosts an accompanying podcast also called PostBourgie."}
{"text":"In 2009, Demby's PostBourgie won a Black Weblog Award for Best News\/Politics Site."}
{"text":"In 2013 and again in 2014, Demby was named to The Root 100's list of the 100 most important black influencers."}
{"text":"In 2014, Demby and the Code Switch team won the Online News Association's award for Best Online Commentary."}
{"text":"Demby is married to fellow journalist Kainaz Amaria, a Zoroastrian American who is currently a visuals editor for Vox Media. The couple live in Washington."}
{"text":"Gordon Blaine Hancock (June 23, 1884 \u2013 July 24, 1970) was a professor at Virginia Union University and a leading spokesman for African American equality in the generation before the civil rights movement."}
{"text":"Hancock was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Norfolk Journal and Guide whose columns were published in 114 black newspapers. He was one of the organizers of the 1942 Southern Conference on Race Relations and gave the opening keynote address. This conference led to the publication of \"A Basis for Inter-Racial Cooperation and Development in the South: A Statement by Southern Negroes,\" known as the Durham Manifesto, which asserted that the group was \"fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of segregation,\" including staunch opposition to Jim Crow."}
{"text":"Hancock joined the faculty at Virginia Union University in 1921. He became the chairman of the department of Economics and Sociology as well as the Director of the Francis J. Torrance School of Race Relations at Virginia Union University. He linked education to activism, requiring students to perform community service, and encouraged black people to patronize black-owned businesses, calling this the \"Double Duty Dollar.\""}
{"text":"Hancock was born in Ninety Six, South Carolina to Robert and Anna Hancock who had been formerly enslaved. He earned degrees from Benedict College and Colgate University, and received a master's degree in sociology from Harvard University. He was married to Florence Marie Dickson. He was the pastor of Moore Street Baptist church in Richmond from 1925 until he retired in 1963."}
{"text":"Hancock became a member of Gamma chapter of Omega Psi Phi while attending Harvard and working towards his master's degree in sociology."}
{"text":"The Urban League of Greater Richmond was co-founded by Dr. Gordon B. Hancock, and became affiliated with the National Urban League on December 1, 1923; which covers the areas of the Chester, Chesterfield, Henrico, Petersburg, and the City of Richmond, VA. This chapter of the Urban League's mission is:\"To assist under-served citizens in the achievement of social and economic equality through advocacy, collaboration direct services and research.\"The Urban League of Greater Richmond also provides programs and services to help members seek and acquire jobs, healthcare, and support educational endeavors."}
{"text":"In October of the year 1925, Gordon B. Hancock became the pastor of Moore Street Baptist Church. After nearly forty years of serving the community as a Pastor, Hancock retires in 1963."}
{"text":"Hancock proposed a spending plan called \"Double Duty Dollar\", that encouraged black people to hold fast to their jobs, land and money while spending money within the African-American community. He believed that unemployment was the number one problem for African-American people. He also welcomed white philanthropists and teachers who supported African-Americans in their struggle for a quality education."}
{"text":"Hancock came to Virginia Union as a professor to organize and lead a sociology and economics department. Hancock taught students that the black race was not inferior to white nor prone to criminal activity. Hancock believed that with better income opportunities, black people could break the bonds of cyclical poverty. His course in race relation at Virginia Union was believed to be the first in the country."}
{"text":"Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey (31 December 1895 \u2013 25 July 1973) was the Jamaican-born second wife of Marcus Garvey, and a journalist and activist in her own right. She was one of the pioneering female Black journalists and publishers of the 20th century."}
{"text":"Amy Euphemia Jacques was born on 31 December 1895 in Kingston, Jamaica. As the eldest child of George Samuel and Charlotte Henrietta (\"n\u00e9e\" South) Jacques, she was raised in a middle-class home. Yvette Taylor, in her account of the life of Amy Jacques Garvey, refers to her as being \"mulatta\". Charlotte Henrietta was half-white, and George Samuel was a dark-skinned black. Taylor goes on to explain that her mixed race heavily influenced her upbringing. At a young age, Garvey was taught to play the piano and took courses in music appreciation because music and music appreciation were believed to be considered the \"cultural finishing to a girl's education\". Garvey was a part of a small minority of Jamaican youth to attend high school. She attended Wolmer's Schools."}
{"text":"AJ Garvey was urged by her father to read periodicals and newspapers to \"enhance\" her knowledge of the world. Upon graduating school and receiving some of the highest honours of the time, Garvey was recruited to work at a law firm. Her father initially said no, refusing to allow his daughter to work in an environment with males. George Samuel died that year, and the lawyer proceeding over his estate urged Charlotte Henrietta to allow Garvey to work in the clerical office so that she could control the estate. Charlotte agreed, and Garvey worked there for four years, where she ultimately gained knowledge of the legal system."}
{"text":"After four years of working for this company, Garvey migrated to the United States in 1917. She promised her employer and mother that she would return in three months if conditions in the U.S. were not suitable to her; however, Garvey did not return. Karen Adler, in her article chronicling Garvey's life, argues that she did not return because she was enthralled by Garveyism."}
{"text":"Adler says that Amy attended a conference being held by Marcus Garvey and was moved by his words, soon afterwards assuming the role of his private secretary and working alongside him and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). She also became involved with the publishing of the \"Negro World\" newspaper in Harlem from its inception in August 1918."}
{"text":"On July 27, 1922, several months after his previous marriage was severed, Marcus and Amy were married in Baltimore."}
{"text":"Jacques was said to have been Amy Ashwood's (Marcus Garvey's previous wife) chief bridesmaid in her wedding to Garvey. Ashwood attempted to have the second marriage annulled and failed, leaving Amy Jacques as Garvey's legitimate wife."}
{"text":"Garvey had two children in her marriage, Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. and Julius Winston Garvey born in 1930 and 1933 respectively."}
{"text":"Garvey was said to have been an excellent speaker, having toured the country with and without her husband."}
{"text":"After making a return from their western tour, Marcus was scheduled to speak in New York and Amy was not a part of the program."}
{"text":"Even though she was not scheduled to speak at the event she was allowed to because of the mass outcry by the crowd Adler believes that Marcus Garvey failed to show any appreciation for his wife despite her growing fame in the public forum. Amy, however, did not pose an initial threat to Garvey. Given her strong beliefs in her position as his wife, and the structure of the organization, Amy took a back seat, as did other women in the UNIA . The grievances were made public at UNIA's national convention in 1922. Sexism found a means to thrive even in spite of UNIA's commitment to sexual equality. This being the case, women such as Amy Jacques Garvey found a way to become invaluable to the organization."}
{"text":"After her husband was deported in 1927, Garvey went with him to Jamaica. They had two sons: Marcus Mosiah Garvey III (b. 1930) and Julius Winston Garvey (b. 1933). She remained with their children in Jamaica when Garvey moved to England in 1934."}
{"text":"After Garvey's death in 1940, Jacques continued the struggle for black nationalism and African independence. In 1944 she wrote \"A Memorandum Correlative of Africa, West Indies and the Americas\", which she used to convince U.N. representatives to adopt an African Freedom Charter."}
{"text":"In November 1963, Garvey visited Nigeria as a guest of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was being installed as that nation's first Governor-General. She published her own book, \"Garvey and Garveyism\", in 1963, as well as a booklet, \"Black Power in America: The Power of the Human Spirit\", in 1968. She also assisted John Henrik Clarke in editing \"Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa\" (1974). Her final work was the \"Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey volume III\", written in conjunction with E. U. Essien-Udom."}
{"text":"She was awarded the Musgrave Medal in 1971."}
{"text":"Garvey was an ardent writer on behalf of the UNIA movement and her husband, Marcus Garvey."}
{"text":"Garvey died aged 77 on 25 July 1973, in her native Kingston, Jamaica, and was interred in the churchyard of Saint Andrew's Parish Church."}
{"text":"The Mis-Education of the Negro is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that Blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to \"do for themselves\", regardless of what they were taught:"}
{"text":"History shows that it does not matter who is in power... those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they did in the beginning."}
{"text":"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."}
{"text":"Chapter 1 \u201cThe Seat Of The Trouble\u201d in this chapter Dr. Carter Woodson explains how African Americans can feel out of place as they are subjected to despise themselves within the given educational system. He identifies how African Americans are often influenced to become a \u201cgood negro\u201d in order to become successful, and this ideology urges them to downplay their \u201cblackness\u201d to advance in the social ladder, but being educated and moving up the social ladder does not eliminate one's blackness. This problem could possibly be avoided if African Americans had equal opportunity to learn about their culture and black history."}
{"text":"Chapter 2 \u201cHow We Missed The Mark\u201d in this chapter Woodson explains how the educational system failed to support African Americans because of how their schools were unable to properly teach them, when compared to predominantly white schools that were fully furnished and had the means to give their students the right education. Woodson believed that African Americans should experience different means of education to develop and show their individual skills rather than to be educated practically."}
{"text":"Chapter 3 \u201cHow We Drifted Away From The Truth\u201d In this chapter Woodson discusses how African Americans are separated from the truth of their actual contributions to history due to it being \u201cwhite-washed.\u201d \u00a0He analyzed many cases in which this makes white people believe they are superior by taking away the important contributions from black people. He also shows how black teachers are often no help in fixing the problem as they continue to teach white-washed versions of history to the future generations of students."}
{"text":"Chapter 4 \u201cEducation Under Outside Control\u201d in this chapter Woodson speaks on how African Americans are given educationally less valuable opportunities despite whether the institution is historically black or predominately white. Woodson believes that equal education opportunities have an effect on individuals and the life that they create for themselves. He also encourages African Americans to create better opportunities in many aspects for themselves so they can live better lives. \u201cThe program for the uplift of the negro in this country must be based upon a scientific study of the negro from within to develop in him the power to do for himself what his oppressors will never do for him.\u201d"}
{"text":"\u201cThe Failure to Make a Living\u201d highlights a lot of the problems that black people who attend college face when presented with how to apply that knowledge to the working world, or more specifically owning and operating a business. One of the main problems that Woodson introduces is the lack of support systems that many black Americans don\u2019t have, especially when compared to those of a similar standing who happen to be white."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Educated Negro Leaves the Masses\u201d discusses the estrangement that many educated black people have from the black church and the lack of support the black church receives from the educated as a result. According to Woodson, some of the things educated black people are doing instead of supporting the black church are switching to predominantly white denominations, or not attending church altogether. Woodson emphasizes the importance of the black church as \u201cthe only institution that the race controls.\u201d"}
{"text":"In \u201cDissension and Weakness,\u201d Woodson discusses the lack of tolerance those in rural areas have for dissension and differences in denomination around them. Woodson, once again, refers back to the lack of guidance and presence educated black people have in the black church and the effects of it; which includes children becoming more involved with gambling, drinking, and smoking."}
{"text":"\u201cProfessional Education Discouraged\u201d discusses the discouragement many black Americans face in academic settings. Some of the prime examples Woodson brings to light are how black Americans are told there will be no job opportunities in particular fields should they choose to study them, being told they are not fit for certain fields, and being discredited or ignored despite being well educated in a particular field."}
{"text":"The next chapter, \u201cPolitical Education Neglected,\u201d begins with some examples as to how African Americans have been previously kept from learning about American politics, one example being when a bill that would print the Constitution of the United States in all schools was turned down because \u201cit would never do to have Negroes study the Constitution of the United States.\" Woodson also lays out a brief history of other times when African Americans were kept from learning about laws that govern their everyday life and the policies that were keeping them subservient."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Loss of Vision\u201d describes how Woodson feels the black population of America has lost sight of a common goal. In this chapter he brings up how in what he calls \u201cour so-called democracy, we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them. We do not show the Negro to overcome segregation, but we teach them how to accept it as final and just.\" Woodson expresses the need for African Americans to overcome segregation by proving that they are just as good as an asset to society as white Americans."}
{"text":"\u201cThe Need for Service Rather than Leadership\u201d describes the stifling of African Americans\u2019 ambition and roadblocks that keep them from becoming leaders. Woodson also lays out the reasons as to why this, but mostly shifting the blame to the lack of unity within the African American community; often referring back to points made in \u201cThe Educated Negro Leaves the Masses\u201d and how there is too much internal conflict and dissension within the community to allow for upward mobility for the community as a whole."}
{"text":"In \u201cHirelings in the Places of Public Servants,\u201d Woodson brings up the lack of African Americans in positions of power in the workplace. Woodson brings up many examples of African Americans put in management positions not being given the same respect and attention their white counterparts are given, and why this is."}
{"text":"In \u201cThe New Type of Professional Man Required,\u201d Woodson discusses the many hardships black lawyers and doctors encounter in their professional careers. One of the problems he discusses for black lawyers would be how they are often forced to focus on the particular laws that disproportionately affect African Americans. He seems to take issue with many black doctors and their motivations for going into such work: He says, \u201cToo many Negroes go into medicine and dentistry for selfish purposes, hoping thereby to increase their income and spend it on joyous living.\" He also discusses the exclusion of African Americans from the arts."}
{"text":"\u201cHigher Strivings In The Service Of The Country\u201d. In this chapter, Woodson emphasizes his political views. Woodson believed that African Americans should not just focus on themselves and address only issues that apply to them, but should address issues that apply to everyone"}
{"text":"In chapter 18, \u201cThe Study of the Negro,\u201d Woodson emphasizes the importance of again knowing the history and the importance of African American culture. He strongly believed that Blacks need to study their history more. Dr. Woodson believed that blacks have come to hate their history due to slavery and being treated unfairly but are strongly taught to learn and respect other cultures\u2019 history."}
{"text":"Many praised Woodson and his work as a glimpse into the problems that plague African Americans' social advancement."}
{"text":"Ron Daniels, with the Michigan City said, \u201cCarter G. Woodson, one of our most distinguished historians, and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, was convinced that the dilemma of racial consciousness and identity was not an accident. [...] Our history, culture and identity should serve as a basic for a group cohesion, and the collective pursuit of an African-American agenda for moral, social, economic and political advancement.\u201d"}
{"text":"Another had to say, \u201cThe result was a caustic and uncompromising litany that seemed to go on forever. Negro education, Woodson charged, clung to a defunct \u201cmachine method\u201d based on the misguided assumption that \u201ceducation is merely a process of imparting information.\u201d it failed to inspire black students and \u201cdid not bring their minds into harmony with life as they must face it.\u201d theories of Negro inferiority were \u201cdrilled\u201d into black pupils in virtually every classroom they entered. And the more education blacks received, the more \u201cestranged from the masses\u201d they became.\u201d"}
{"text":"The Journal of Black Studies on Woodson himself said, \"Carter G. Woodson believed that education was much more than the transferal of knowledge from teacher to student: He believed that authentic education would not only teach students to think and recite information also allow students to ask difficult epistemological and ontological questions about life, political systems, social and economic inequities, and the very purpose of humankind.\""}
{"text":"The title of Lauryn Hill's 1998 best-selling album \"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill\" is a reference to the book's naming."}
{"text":"Urban Christian fiction is a subgenre of Christian fiction and urban fiction in which conflicting stories of emotion and vividness mixes God, the urban church, and faith. Violence and sex is not purposely excluded, but are included whenever necessary for the story line. God is the center of the characters' lives in Urban Christian fiction, and these stories usually portray African-American or Latino urban culture. Urban Christian fiction is classified as part of the African-American Christian Market (AACM), where the hot-selling topics are fiction, books for dating, dramatic testimony, and single parenting. Some of the themes and topics considered within \"Urban Christian fiction\" cross over into theological fiction."}
{"text":"Black Futures is an American anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work, edited by writer Jenna Wortham and curator Kimberly Drew. Writer Teju Cole, singer Solange Knowles and activist Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter, are among the book's more than 100 contributors. The 544-page collection was published in 2020, receiving strongly favorable reviews."}
{"text":"Beginning their collaboration in 2015, \"New York Times\" writer Jenna Wortham and curator and activist Kimberly Drew aimed to record the way \"communities of Black people [were] interacting and engaging in new ways because of social media ... creating our own signage and language,\" Wortham said. They originally conceived of creating a zine, but ultimately concluded the accessibility technology available for books would allow more people to engage with the work."}
{"text":"The 544-page collection, designed by Wael Marcos and Jonathan Key, was published on December 1, 2020 by One World, publisher Chris Jackson's imprint at Penguin Random House."}
{"text":"The 544-page anthology, collecting works of more than 100 contributors, includes discussions, like writer Rembert Browne and filmmaker Ezra Edelman on Colin Kaepernick, as well as works, for example artist Yetunde Olagbaju's \"I Will Protect Black People\" contract. In addition to traditional media such as painting and essays, \"Black Futures\" includes creative works in the form of recipes, Instagram posts, tweets, street art, and communal gatherings. These are organized by theme, included \"Justice\", \"Power\", \"Joy\", \"Black is (Still Beautiful)\", \"Memory\", and \"Legacy\"."}
{"text":"Other contributors include activist Alicia Garza (co-founder of Black Lives Matter), writer Morgan Parker, comedian Ziwe Fumudoh, writer Teju Cole and singer Solange Knowles."}
{"text":"\"Black Futures\" received enthusiastic reviews, beginning with a starred review in \"Kirkus\". Writing in \"The Root\", Maiysha Kai called \"Black Futures\" \"a weighty and gorgeously bound compendium of Black creativity\"."}
{"text":"For Koul, who is not Black, the cumulative experience creates a call to action\u2014\"a question any non-Black person inevitably comes back to again and again throughout the book: If you know the fight, will you join it?\" \"Publishers Weekly\" also emphasized this effect, \"This unique and imaginative work issues a powerful call for justice, equality, and inclusion\". But Koul also noted that struggle was not the only Black experience documented, and as a non-Black reader she felt grateful \"to be let in on [the book's] moments of joyous intimacy. You feel thankful for being offered entry\"."}
{"text":"The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually by the Langston Hughes Festival of the City College of New York since 1978. The medal \"is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their impressive works of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and critical essays that help to celebrate the memory and tradition of Langston Hughes. Each year, the LHF\u2019s Advisory Committee reviews the work of major black writers from Africa to America whose work is accessed as likely having a lasting impact on world literature.\"."}
{"text":"Recipients of the Langston Hughes medallion are:"}
{"text":"Urban fiction, also known as street lit or street fiction, is a literary genre set in a city landscape; however, the genre is as much defined by the socio-economic realities and culture of its characters as the urban setting. The tone for urban fiction is usually dark, focusing on the underside of city living. Profanity, sex, and violence are usually explicit, with the writer not shying away from or watering-down the material. Most authors of this genre draw upon their past experiences to depict their storylines."}
{"text":"Contemporary urban fiction was (and largely still is) a genre written by African Americans. In his famous essay \"The Souls of Black Folk\", W. E. B. Du Bois discussed how a veil separated the African American community from the outside world. By extension, fiction written by people outside the African American culture could not (at least with any degree of verisimilitude) depict the people, settings, and events experienced by people in that culture. Try as some might, those who grew up outside the veil (i.e., outside the urban culture) may find it difficult to write fiction grounded in inner-city and African American life."}
{"text":"City novels of yesteryear that depict the low-income survivalist realities of city living can also be considered urban fiction or street lit. In her book, \"The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature\" (2011), Vanessa Irvin Morris points out that titles considered canonical or \"classic\" today, could be considered the urban fiction or \"street lit\" of its day."}
{"text":"Titles that depict historical inner-city realities include Stephen Crane's \"\" (1893), Charles Dickens's \"Oliver Twist\" (1838), Paul Laurence Dunbar's \"The Sport of the Gods\" (1902) and Langston Hughes's \u201cThe Ballad of the Landlord\u201d (1940). In this vein, urban fiction is not just an African American or Latino phenomenon, but, rather, the genre exists along a historical continuum that includes stories from diverse cultural and ethnic experiences."}
{"text":"In the 1970s, during the culmination of the Black Power movement, a jailed Black man named Robert Beck took the pen name Iceberg Slim and wrote \"Pimp\", a dark, gritty tale of life in the inner-city underworld. While the book contained elements of the Black Power agenda, it was most notable for its unsparing depiction of street life."}
{"text":"Iceberg Slim wrote many other novels and attained an international following. Some of the terminology he used in his books crossed over into the lexicon of Black English. Other writers included Donald Goines and, notably, Claude Brown's \"Manchild in the Promised Land\", which was published in 1965. Also published that year was \"The Autobiography of Malcolm X\" by Alex Haley\".\" Because Haley's non-fictional read captured the realistic nature of African American urban life for coming-of-age young men, the book has consistently served as a standard for reading among African American teenaged boys."}
{"text":"Hip hop lit: hip hop music as an urban ballad."}
{"text":"During the 1980s and early 1990s, urban fiction in print experienced a decline. However, one could make a cogent argument that urban tales simply moved from print to music, as hip hop music exploded in popularity. Of course, for every emcee who signed a recording contract and made the airwaves, ten more amateurs plied the streets and local clubs, much like urban bards, griots or troubadours telling urban fiction in an informal, oral manner rather than in a neat, written form."}
{"text":"One of the most famous emcees, Tupac Shakur, is sometimes called a ghetto prophet and an author of urban fiction in lyrical form. Shakur's early poetry was posthumously compiled into a volume entitled \"The Rose That Grew from Concrete\" in 1999."}
{"text":"Modern hip-hop literature in print form is a thriving and popular genre. Many non-fiction publications from figures in the hip-hop realm such as Russell Simmons, Kevin Liles, LL Cool J, and FUBU founder Daymond John feature prominently in this genre. Karrine Steffans and shock jock Wendy Williams have written blockbuster books for this audience. Both Steffans and emcee 50 Cent have had such success with their books that they were given their own imprints to usher in similar authors, such as for 50 Cent's G-Unit Books."}
{"text":"Contemporary street lit: The new wave of urban fiction."}
{"text":"Toward the end of the 1990s, urban fiction experienced a revival, as demand for novels authentically conveying the urban experience increased, and new business models enabled fledgling writers to more easily bring a manuscript to market and to libraries. The first writer in this new cycle of urban fiction was Omar Tyree, who published the novel \"Flyy Girl\" in 1996, which was reissued as a reprint in 1999."}
{"text":"The genre gained significant momentum in 1999 with Sister Souljah's bestseller \"The Coldest Winter Ever\". Teri Woods's \"True to the Game\" was also published in 1999, and became the standard from which the entrepreneurial publishing and distribution of contemporary urban fiction took note. The simultaneous publishing of these three novels created a momentum of readership for urban fiction and carried that wave for years. Thus \"The Coldest Winter Ever\", \"True to the Game\", and \"Flyy Girl\" are considered classics in the renaissance of the genre."}
{"text":"Sister Souljah describes the untapped market for urban fiction and the stereotypes that held it back in its early years:"}
{"text":"In less than a decade, urban fiction has experienced a renaissance that boasts thousands of titles. The newest wave of street fiction is urban Latino fiction novels such as \"Devil's Mambo\" by Jerry Rodriguez, Chained by Deborah Cardona (a.k.a. Sexy) and Jeff Rivera's \"Forever My Lady\"."}
{"text":"Major writers of contemporary urban fiction include Wahida Clark, Vickie Stringer, Nikki Turner, K'wan Foye, Toy Styles, Roy Glenn, Kwame Teague, who many believed penned Teri Woods' \"Dutch\", and the writing duo Meesha Mink & De'Nesha Diamond."}
{"text":"There is also an unexpected literary wave of hip-hop fiction and street lit, which was sparked by Sister Souljah. Authors with a book or books in this offering include Saul Williams, Abiola Abrams, and Felicia Pride. These are hip hop lit or street lit books that take a more literary approach using metaphor, signifying and other literary devices. These books may also be used in socially redeeming or classroom capacities, while maintaining love and positivity for the music and hip hop culture."}
{"text":"With this new wave of renaissance, \"street lit\" was breaking new ground when it came to promotion and exposure. Aside from hand-to-hand sales, which seems to work best in a genre where word-of-mouth has proven to be worth more than any large ad campaign, the Internet has increased the authors' and publishers' ability to reach out to the genre's readers."}
{"text":"With Internet savvy, many self-published authors who once had no shot of recognition are now household names, such as author Rasheed Clark, who went from relatively unknown, to being honored with fourteen Infini Literary Award nominations for his first two novels, \"Stories I Wouldn't Tell Nobody But God\" and \"Cold Summer Afternoon\", both of which became instant bestsellers and proved that Clark was a fresh voice in African American fiction, and a leading African-American writer."}
{"text":"Authors in this genre such as K'wan Foye, Nikki Turner, and Toy Styles are known for bringing street teams and other musical promotion efforts to the book scene. In recent years, some of these authors have joined with hip hop artists such as 50 Cent to further promote the genre by penning the musicians' real-life stories."}
{"text":"In 2010, the hip hop music label Cash Money Records established a publishing branch, Cash Money Content. However, Cash Money Content's last book, \"Animal 3\", was published in November 2014."}
{"text":"Vickie Stringer is an urban lit author, as well as founder and CEO of her own publishing company, Triple Crown Publications, a publisher of 45 novels and 35 writers as of 2008."}
{"text":"Forums like AALBC are often used to keep track of the progressive urban fiction genre as it grows tremendously daily."}
{"text":"Early criticism of street lit was that books were badly edited due to lack of copy editing by independent publishers. However, in recent years the mainstream publishing industry recognized the genre's potential and signed many street lit authors to contracts, thus producing better packaged product. One such author was Treasure E. Blue, according to Kirkus Reviews Magazine, a self-published sensation\u2014it has reportedly sold 65,000 copies before getting signed to a major six-figure deal with Random House Publishing."}
{"text":"The reach of urban fiction into a large youth readership is undeniable today. Researchers have turned their attention to its influence on urban literacy, particularly among adolescent girls. Despite misgivings about editing quality issues, secondary school teachers in suburban settings have included urban literature in curricula, referring to it as \"multicultural young adult literature\" to expose students to \"authentic\" voices representing urban life."}
{"text":"Because this genre is very popular with urban teenagers, the following reading lists should prove to be helpful for teachers and librarians."}
{"text":"Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (), published in 1987, is a book by Hazel Carby which centers on slave narratives by women."}
{"text":"Carby received her Ph.D. in 1984 from Birmingham University. Her doctoral dissertation later became the foundation for the book. \"Reconstructing Womanhood\" analyzes writings from black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as examines the social, political, and historical landscapes in which these works were produced. Carby wrote the book with four major aims:"}
{"text":"Your Silence Will Not Protect You is a 2017 posthumous collection of essays, speeches, and poems by African American author and poet Audre Lorde. It is the first time a British publisher collected Lorde's work into one volume. The collection focuses on key themes such as: shifting language into action, silence as a form of violence, and the importance of history. Lorde describes herself as a \"Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet\", and addresses the difficulties in communication between Black and white women."}
{"text":"The collection is made up of five sections. A preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge, an introduction by Sara Ahmed, 13 essays, and 17 poems, and a Note on the Text. As the Note on the Text states, many of the essays in the collection were given as papers at conferences across the U.S. Further, Lorde often revised early poems and re-published them, so many of the poems in this collection are the latest versions of Lorde's work."}
{"text":"\"Your Silence Will Not Protect You\" was published posthumously in order to bring together Lorde's essential poetry, speeches, and essays, into one volume for the first time. As Silver Press states, \"Her extraordinary belief in the power of language \u2013 of speaking \u2013 to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent\"."}
{"text":"\"Your Silence Will Not Protect You\" is a quote from the first essay to appear in the collection, \"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action\". She states, \"My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you\". This references her belief in speaking for oneself and taking language into action."}
{"text":"In \"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action\", Lorde discussed various themes that recur throughout the book, including silence as a form of violence, shifting language into action, and the splintering of the feminist movement. She argued that using her voice to speak and connect with other women during her treatment gave her strength, \"I am not a casualty, I am also a warrior\"."}
{"text":"\"Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power\" discussed how each person has both used and unused types of power. She speaks to the dichotomy of sexuality, and in particular how women have been suppressed from utilizing its power. \"We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society\". She also argued that erotic connection can be used as a form of exploration for self-expression, \"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness...such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial\"."}
{"text":"\"A Conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich\" discussed different periods in Lorde's life, and her struggles with family, writing, and teaching. At one point, she discusses how Black women were sexually assaulted and harmed during times of revolution. She recalls, \"And while we\u2019d be trying to speak to them as women, all we\u2019d hear is, \"The revolution is here, right?'. Seeing how Black women were being used and abused was painful\u201d. She also highlights the differences in protecting one's communities, \"And this is what happens between Black men and women because we have perfected certain kinds of weapons that white women and men have not shared\"."}
{"text":"In \"For Each Of You\" Lorde reinforced the idea of being proud and speaking your mind, especially for the Black community. She tells people to \"be proud of who you are and who you will be\", and \"speak proudly to your children wherever you may find them\". According to a series of interviews conducted with Lorde, this poem \"urges women, Black women specifically, to break through their silence because it is the only way to break through to each other\"."}
{"text":"In \"A Poem For Women in Rage\", Lorde imagines a Black woman intending to kill a white woman waiting for her lesbian lover. Through fury and rage, Lorde confronts the issues between white and Black women and how, \"I am weeping to learn the name of those streets my feet have worn thin with running and why they will never serve me\". As a Black, lesbian, feminist, Lorde dealt with inequalities between how white and Black lesbians were treated in public spaces. She takes out this rage on this hypothetical person in the poem to exhibit her anger over such inequalities."}
{"text":"\"Sister Outsider\" is a poem that also happens to be a book by the same name by Lorde. Lorde compares how, \"We were born poor in a time never touching each other's hunger\" but that now, children are raised to respect themselves and each other. She argues that while accepting and acknowledging the best parts of oneself are important, it is equally important to recognize the dark parts as well."}
{"text":"This collection contains 13 essays and 17 poems, with the essays also including various speeches Lorde made."}
{"text":"Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembling the volume to \"trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash\"."}
{"text":"First published in 1992, in London by Jonathan Cape (having been commissioned by Candida Lacey, now publisher of Myriad Editions), and in New York by Pantheon Books, \"Daughters of Africa\" is regarded as a pioneering work, covering a variety of genres \u2014 including fiction, essays, poetry, drama, memoirs and children's writing \u2014 and more than 1000 pages in extent. Arranged chronologically, beginning with traditional oral poetry, it includes work translated from African languages as well as from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish."}
{"text":"The anthology's title derives from an 1831 declaration by Maria W. Stewart (1803\u20131880), the first African-American woman to give public lectures, in which she said: \"O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! no longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.\""}
{"text":"A companion volume entitled New Daughters of Africa, featuring a further 200-plus contributors, was published in 2019. As described by Bernardine Evaristo in \"The Guardian\" in June 2020: \"Bringing together fiction, poetry, memoir and essays, both books are an incredible introduction to black women\u2019s writing from around the world, and feature every established name you can imagine, as well those who deserve to be better known.\" Associated with the anthology is the Margaret Busby \"New Daughters of Africa\" Award for a woman student from Africa."}
{"text":"\"Daughters of Africa\" was widely praised on publication. Reviewing the anthology for Black British newspaper \"The Weekly Journal\", Evie Arup wrote: \"\"Daughters of Africa\" is a literary first. Never before has the work of women of African descent world-wide been gathered together in one volume. The breadth of this collection is startling... This book should be required reading for any student of literature, and a standard reference book in school libraries, and, to paraphrase that well known slogan, 'every home should have one."}
{"text":"A reviewer from \"The Independent\" observed: \"This book may seem to be about literature but in the end it is as much a testament to language: its power to create attitudes as well as its potency as a means of expression.\" Described by \"The Observer\" as a \"glorious fat anthology that makes a history out of a selection, and puts an unsung group of people on the map\", according to \"Library Journal\", it is \"an invaluable text for courses on women writers and writers of African descent\", and Keneth Kinnamon in \"Callaloo\" saw it as \"impressive\", noting: \"Brief headnotes and long bibliographies enhance the value of this important volume.\""}
{"text":"Lorna Sage in the \"Independent on Sunday\" concluded that \"\"Daughters of Africa\" has a paradoxical universality\", while \"The Washington Post Book World\" called it: \"A magnificent starting place for any reader interested in becoming part of the collective enterprise of discovering and uncovering the silent, forgotten, and underrated voices of black women.\" The reviewer for \"Black Enterprise\" wrote: \"It is a landmark anthology... Busby's first-of-a-kind anthology is a poignant reminder of how vast and varied the body of black women's writing is.\" It has also been called \"groundbreaking in its presentation and exposure of the work of female African writers\", \"one of the most significant assemblages of writers across the diaspora\" and \"the ultimate reference guide to the writing of 'daughters of Africa."}
{"text":"The \"Times Literary Supplement\" review by Maya Jaggi stated: \"With rare exceptions, anthologies of black writing and of women's writing have given the impression that there was very little literary endeavour by black women before the 1980s. Margaret Busby's impressive and imaginative selection of 'words and writings', \"Daughters of Africa\", finally destroys that misconception, while tracing continuities within a tradition of women's writing, deriving from Africa yet stretching across continents and centuries.\""}
{"text":"Jaggi goes on to say: \"Some writings (such as those by ancient Egyptian or Ethiopian queens) have been selected primarily for their historical significance, or to celebrate little-known landmarks of achievement. Most, however, have been chosen for their literary qualities, making the anthology a source of continual pleasure and surprise. (...) The cumulative power of this monumental and absorbing anthology stems from the clarity and vibrancy of the voices it assembles. While effectively dismissing the equation of oppression with 'voicelessness', it restores marginalized or isolated writers to the centre of their own rich, resilient and truly international tradition.\""}
{"text":"The anthology was included in \"Sacred Fire: \"QBR\" 100 Essential Black Books\", which said: \"\"Daughters of Africa\" is a monumental achievement because it is the most comprehensive international anthology of oral and written literature by women of African descent ever attempted. (...) The success of the collection is that it clearly illustrates why all women of African descent are connected by showing how closely related are the obstacles, the chasms of cultural indifference, and the disheartening racial and sexual dilemmas they faced. In so doing, the collection captures the range of their singular and combined accomplishments."}
{"text":"\"Daughters of Africa\"\u2032s accomplishment lies in its glorious portrayal of the richness and magnitude of the spiritual well from which we've all drawn inspiration and to where we've all gone for sustenance, and as such, it is a stunning literary masterpiece.\""}
{"text":"The anthology was on the Royal African Society's list of \"50 Books By African Women That Everyone Should Read\", was named by \"Ms Afropolitan\" as one of \"7 non-fiction books African feminists should read\", features regularly on many required-reading lists, and in the words of Kinna Likimani: \"It remains the ultimate guide to women writers of African descent.\""}
{"text":"More than 200 women are featured in \"Daughters of Africa\", including:"}
{"text":"The anthology inspired Koyo Kouoh to edit a German-language equivalent, \"T\u00f6chter Afrikas\", that was published in 1994."}
{"text":"In 2009 \"Daughters of Africa\" was on \"Wasafiri\" magazine's list of 25 Most Influential Books from the previous quarter-century."}
{"text":"In November 2017, \"Wasafiri\" included a special feature marking the 25th anniversary of the first publication of \"Daughters of Africa\", including an interview with the editor by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, an article by Candida Lacey and contributions from Ayobami Adebayo, Edwige-Ren\u00e9e Dro, Angela Barry, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Nadifa Mohamed, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers about the influence of the anthology on them. \"Importantly, it was a beacon for every young black woman who dreamed of writing. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers told Busby, 'We were behind the bars of apartheid \u2014 we South Africans had been cut off from the beauty and majesty of African thought traditions, and \"Daughters of Africa\" was among those works that replenished our starved minds.'\""}
{"text":"Listing many of the names included in \"Daughters of Africa\", Tom Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi stated: \"These writers can be described as the matriarchs of African literature. They pioneered 'African' writing, in which they were not simply writing stories about their families, communities and countries, but they were also writing themselves into the African literary history and African historiography. They claimed space for women storytellers in the written form, and in some sense reclaimed the woman\u2019s role as the creator and carrier of many African societies\u2019 narratives, considering that the traditional storytelling session was a women\u2019s domain.\""}
{"text":"In December 2017, it was announced that a companion volume, entitled New Daughters of Africa, had been commissioned from Margaret Busby by Myriad Editions. Published on 8 March 2019 and characterised as \"a behemoth of thought and reflection, exploring sisterhood, tradition, romance, race and identity \u2013 individually, and at large\", \"New Daughters of Africa: An international anthology of writing by women of African descent\" features a further 200 writers: \"The new volume expands on and reinforces the assertions of its predecessor. While including texts from the nineteenth century to the present, the book focuses primarily on writers who have come of age in the decades following \"Daughters of Africa\"s publication.\""}
{"text":"\"New Daughters of Africa\" was launched in London at the South Bank Centre on 9 March 2019 at the WOW Festival, and contributors were subsequently featured at many other festivals and venues in the UK and abroad, including at the Wimbledon BookFest, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, and Somerset House. Editions of the anthology have also been published in the US by Amistad (HarperCollins) and in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers."}
{"text":"The review in the \"Irish Times\", describing \"New Daughters of Africa\" as a \"vast and nuanced collection\", notes that it is \"arranged in order of the women's birth decades, a chronological reminder that African women have been creating art for many centuries; the youngest included are still in their twenties. ... a necessary wealth of work \u2013 a welcome addition to any book shelf and a compulsory education for anyone unaware of the countless gifted African women journalists, essayists, poets and speakers who should influence how we see the world.\" John Stevenson concluded his review in \"Black History Month\" magazine by saying: \"Every Black home should own a copy of the book. The literary voices of Black women need to be heard even more urgently now.\""}
{"text":"Imani Perry wrote in the \"Financial Times\": \"Anthologies can read as mere assortment or collection. But their function, particularly when well composed \u2014 as is the case with this book \u2014 can be much more deliberate. Busby's choice to organise the writers by generation, rather than region or date of publication, has a powerful effect. From the 18th century to the present, the location of black women across borders \u2014 yet always in the winds of political, economic and social orders \u2014 emerges. Questions of freedom, autonomy, family, race and social transformation present themselves in generational waves. Thus, with more than 200 contributors, this anthology is also a social and cultural world history.\""}
{"text":"The review by in the Kenyan \"Daily Nation\" said: \"It is the kind of literary compendium that many prospective African women writers need to have today...\"New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent\" is a collection that the expert on literature, women studies, gender studies, African history; the feminist reader\/scholar; or even the general reader will find refreshing considering the scope of the writing, as well as helpful as a reference source.\""}
{"text":"In the opinion of the reviewer for the \"New York Journal of Books\": \"Here is the book so many have been waiting for. The book to make sense of so many others...The topics are just as varied and shine bright lights on the lives of critically underrepresented women of color, and on the contributions of these gifted literary scholars: motherhood, slavery, love, work, immigration, assimilation, friendship, thwarted aspiration, infidelity, racism, marriage, poverty, and on and on."}
{"text":"In fact, the only thing that is not varied here is the gloriously even quality of the writing. These are stories for crying and laughing and thinking. They are narratives for understanding, for seeking, for finding, yes, because it is a catalogue of lives that are not shown as much and as consistently as we need them to be."}
{"text":"...It is, perhaps, this bulk, this excess, this non-superfluous surplus, this literal and literary embarrassment of riches that sends the strongest of messages. Yes, there is this much talent and achievement here in the literature of people of color, the roots of these writers in Africa, but their immense contribution extends to every continent. It is this good. It is this great. So, how is it that it continues to be such a low percentage of all that is published, widely distributed, critiqued, discussed, taught, and shared?\""}
{"text":"Connected with the new anthology, the Margaret Busby \"New Daughters of Africa\" Award was announced by the publisher, Myriad Editions, in partnership with SOAS, University of London, that will benefit an African woman student, with accommodation provided by International Students House, London. The launch of the award was made possible by the fact that, as well as Margaret Busby and her publisher donating to the fund from the anthology's earnings, all the contributors waived their fees in support of the cause. The first recipient of the award was announced in July 2020 as Idza Luhumyo from Kenya."}
{"text":"Also in 2020, Busby and Myriad teamed with community-interest organization The Black Curriculum \u2013 founded to address the lack of black British history being taught \u2013 to donate 500 copies of \"New Daughters of Africa\" to schools in the UK."}
{"text":"\"New Daughters of Africa\" was nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work, alongside books by Petina Gappah, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, who was the eventual winner for Fiction."}
{"text":"In this charged collection, Lorde challenges sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and classism with determination. She propounds the recognition of difference as an empowering vehicle for action and creative change and emphasizes the necessity for applying these concepts to the next generation of feminism - a response to the current lacking thereof between women in the mainstream feminist movement. Lorde also explores the fear and suspicion that arises among African American men and women, lesbians, feminists, and white women that ultimately creates an isolating experience for African American women - constructing a social institution that dehumanizes lives. Throughout these essays, Lorde confronts this problem of institutional dehumanization plaguing American culture during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and provides with philosophical reasoning, messages of hope."}
{"text":"Lorde signed a contract with The Crossing Press on November 19, 1982 with a projected publication date of May 31, 1984. She was the first major lesbian author the press was to sign, despite the firm's policy of not taking books represented by agents. Lorde expressed to her agent that she felt rushed into signing the contract that provided an advance against royalties of a mere $100. The book was ultimately a huge financial success for the firm. It was republished in 2007 by The Crossing Press with a new forward provided by scholar and essayist, Cheryl Clarke."}
{"text":"The book is composed of essays and talks by Lorde, including the following:"}
{"text":"\"Sister Outsider\" received critical reception, as well. The book challenges readers' unacknowledged privileges and complicity in oppression. Negative reviewers tended to focus on how \"Sister Outsider\" caused them discomfort with confronting their guilt as individuals whose identities occupy dominant positions within the United States, specifically through whiteness, maleness, youth, thinness, heterosexuality, Christianity, and financial security. While some reviewers claimed that the work is hard to identify with if they are not similar to Lorde, others refute this, claiming that Lorde uses a \"flexible model of subject positioning\" that allows readers of various backgrounds to determine points of similarity and difference, challenging their standard notions of selfhood and subjectivity."}
{"text":"In \"The Man Question,\" Kathy Ferguson questions Lorde's employment of what she defines as \"Cosmic Feminism\", a feminism that relies on a feminine primitivism and values feelings that are more intense and seemingly deep-rooted."}
{"text":"Callaloo, A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, is a quarterly literary magazine that was established in 1976 by Charles Rowell, who remains its editor-in-chief. It contains creative writing, visual art, and critical texts about literature and culture of the African diaspora, and is probably the longest continuously running African-American literary magazine.. It has been published by the Johns Hopkins University Press since 1986."}
{"text":"In addition to receiving grants of support from agencies such as the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the magazine has garnered a number of honors, including the best special issue of a journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for \"The Haitian Issues\" in 1992 (volume 15.2 & 3: \"Haiti: the Literature and Culture\" Parts I & II); an honorable mention for the \"Best Special Issue of a Journal\" in 2001 from the Professional\/Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association (volume 24.1: \"The Confederate Flag Controversy: A Special Section\"); and recognition for the Winter 2002 issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals as one of the best special issues of that year (volume 25.1: \"Jazz Poetics\")."}
{"text":"\"Callaloo\" is abstracted and indexed in the following bibliographic databases:"}
{"text":"According to Scopus, it has a 2018 CiteScore of 0.04, ranking 479\/736 in the category \"Literature and Literary Theory\"."}
{"text":"The Afro-Hispanic Review is an English-Spanish bilingual peer-reviewed academic journal published by Vanderbilt University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center. The journal focuses on promoting the study of Afro-Latino literature and culture, both in the United States and internationally. Published twice annually, it has been described as the \"premier literary journal in Afro-Hispanic studies.\" Its editor is the Vanderbilt professor William Luis."}
{"text":"The journal was founded in January 1982 at Howard University, with Stanley Cyrus as its founding editor. Beginning in 1986, it was published at the University of Missouri, as a collaboration between the departments of Black studies and Romance languages. It was transferred to Vanderbilt and its Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center in 2005."}
{"text":"Journal of Black Studies is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of social sciences and ethnic studies concerning African-American culture. The journal's editors-in-chief are Molefi Kete Asante (Temple University) and Ama Mazama (Temple University). The journal was established in 1970 and is currently published by SAGE Publications."}
{"text":"The \"Journal of Black Studies\" is abstracted and indexed in, among other databases: SCOPUS, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the \"Journal Citation Reports\", its 2017 impact factor is 0.571, ranking it 70th out of 98 journals in the category \"Social Sciences\" and 15 out of 16 journals in the category \"Ethnic Studies\"."}
{"text":"African American Communication: Exploring Identity and Culture is a 2003 book by Michael Hecht, Ronald L. Jackson II and Sidney A. Ribeau."}
{"text":"its interactional approach and its subject matter\"."}
{"text":"Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, authored by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Jr., is an anthropological and sociological study of the African-American urban experience in the first half of the 20th century. Published in 1945, later expanded editions added some material relating to the 1950s and 1960s. Relying on massive research conducted in Chicago, primarily as part of a Works Progress Administration program, Drake and Cayton produced, according to the \"Encyclopedia of African American History\", a \"foundational text in African American history, cultural studies, and urban sociology.\""}
{"text":"The original text begins with an introduction by novelist Richard Wright in which he relates some of the research to the themes of his work, particularly the novel, \"Native Son.\" The preface of the book, authored by Drake and Cayton, provides an overview of the Black Metropolis. The first section of the book then sketches the history of African-Americans in Chicago, up to the early years of the Great Migration, when millions of African-Americans left the Southern United States for Northern cities."}
{"text":"The book was expanded by Drake and Cayton in later editions in the 1950s and 1960s. It has been reissued by the University of Chicago Press in 1993 and 2015."}
{"text":"In the \"American Sociological Review\", Samuel Strong wrote, \"[t]he style of the volume alternates between systematic analysis, literary excursions, and journalistic protest writing. In spite of any critical observations one may direct against this book, it represents a real contribution to the literature. ...\" The reviewer for \"The Journal of Politics\", Rosalind Lepawsky, noted the breadth of the book but found it confusing, and thought it was missing an emphasis on psychology and would benefit from a more popular treatment. Carter Woodson, writing in \"The Journal of Negro History\", found the book a creditworthy and commendable effort."}
{"text":"Aimee Cox, in her 2015 study of a group black girls in Detroit, states that although she was not interested in critiquing \"Black Metropolis\", she denotes it as beginning a trend in urban sociology of focusing on the success of black men, and excluding black women. She also argues that the ideas of 'success' assumed in \"Black Metropolis\" for \"advancing the race\" are primarily economic and class based."}
{"text":"According to James N. Gregory, writing in 2007, the book emphasized physical segregation and social disorganization theory, tending to diminish the achievements of the Black community and \"introduc(ing) the ghetto story that would guide (perceptions for) the next half century.\" Gregory also argues there is irony that the very concept of the \"Black Metropolis,\" which had been a \"celebratory terminology\" among Black journalists, was eroded by the study because, in Gregory's view, the study emphasized the limits of urban Black life, rather than its achievements."}
{"text":"African American Review (AAR) is a scholarly aggregation of essays on African-American literature, theatre, film, the visual arts, and culture; interviews; poetry; fiction; and book reviews."}
{"text":"The journal has featured writers and cultural critics including Trudier Harris, Arnold Rampersad, Hortense Spillers, Amiri Baraka, Cyrus Cassells, Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, Cheryl Wall, and Toni Morrison. It is the official publication of the Modern Language Association's LLC African American. Between 1967 and 1976, the journal appeared under the title Negro American Literature Forum and until 1992 as Black American Literature Forum before obtaining its current title. It is based in St. Louis."}
{"text":"\"AAR\" has received three American Literary Magazine Awards for Editorial Content, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses."}
{"text":"The Journal of Black Psychology is a quarterly psychology journal published by the Association of Black Psychologists. The journal publishes original research from an international array of authors in a variety of areas:"}
{"text":"The journal was founded in 1974 and its editor-in-chief is Beverly Vandiver (Western Michigan University)."}
{"text":"The journal is abstracted and indexed in Social Science Citation Index, Academic Search Premier, ERIC, PubMed, and PyscInfo among others."}
{"text":"According to \"Journal Citation Reports\", the journal has a 2017 impact factor of 1.551 ranking in 54 out of 135 in Psychology, Multidisciplinary."}
{"text":"Phylon (subtitle: \"the Clark Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture\") is a semi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal covering culture in the United States from an African-American perspective. It was established in 1940 by W. E. B. Du Bois, at what was then known as Atlanta University, as a magazine dedicated to race and culture. In 1957, the magazine was renamed \"The Phylon Quarterly\", and in 1960 it was renamed again, this time to its original title. It resumed publication in 2015 as an online-only journal, as a result of a collaboration between Atlanta University Center and Clark Atlanta University (formerly Atlanta University). The editor-in-chief is Obie Clayton (Clark Atlanta University)."}
{"text":"Afro-Americans in New York Life and History"}
{"text":"Afro-Americans in New York Life and History is an academic journal organized and distributed by Buffalo, New York's Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier."}
{"text":"Founded in 1977, the journal's mission statement informs readers that its purpose is \"to publish analytical, historical, and descriptive articles dealing with the life and history of Afro-Americans in New York State.\" The Articles featured, deal with methodology and trends in local and regional African-American studies, historical and current. Additionally, documents are frequently published that have historical significance to the African-American in the state of New York, specifically. Finally, book reviews are published pertaining to aspects of the life, history, and culture of people of African descent and race relations."}
{"text":"At the time of the journal's first publication, the success of Alex Haley's novel \"\" (1976) had created an immense, new found interest in the African-American community for the discovery, preservation, and presentation of the often-overlooked rich cultural heritage that African Americans had established in the United States."}
{"text":"The plight of African Americans in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries can be connected to many different issues. The barriers of racism, economics and politics have greatly contributed to the oppression of people of color. These barriers continue to do so today. Whether purposefully or unknowingly actions in today's world due to these have left scars on society that have yet to heal. \"Afro-Americans in New York Life and History\" has played an important role in merging academic and community perspectives of African-American history and culture."}
{"text":"As of July 2013, Seneca Vaught, professor of history and African Studies at Kennesaw State University, is the journal's Editor, aided by Associate Editors Clarence Williams of CUNY, Lillian Williams of SUNY at Buffalo, and Oscar R. Williams of SUNY at Albany. A variety of scholars who are interested in furthering the field of African-American history serve as Contributing Editors."}
{"text":"In addition to Editorial supervision, the twenty-three member Board of Directors that oversees the Afro-American Historical Association of the Niagara Frontier also has input into the operation and contents of the journal."}
{"text":"The issues concerning this journal are aimed towards African Americans in New York, with prevalent issues brought to light and discussed in the volumes of \"Afro-Americans in New York Life and History\"."}
{"text":"In 2005, the New York Historical Society held an exhibition titled \"Slavery in New York\". An issue regarding \"Slavery in Albany, New York\" by Oscar Williams, Vol. 34, No. 2 (July 2010) emphasized that slavery was not limited to the south. In 1991, human remains by construction workers in lower Manhattan raised awareness of the African Burial Ground, where slaves in New York City were buried. Slavery was practiced into the 19th century. Most studies on slavery in New York have mentioned other New York cities sparingly. There is a failure on an understanding that slavery was widespread throughout New York. The capital, Albany, houses a special relationship of slavery beginning with the establishment of the Dutch West India Company in 1621."}
{"text":"The Carter G. Woodson essay contest is a scholarship awarded to students, ranging from grades 4-12, that show significant ability in writing. These essays are themed and students must be a resident from the western New York area. Cash prizes and certificates are presented to the winner. The winners' essays will be published in \"Historically Speaking\" and read at the African American History Program."}
{"text":"Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America is a 2000 book by American linguist and political commentator John McWhorter in which he argues that it is not external racial prejudice and discrimination but instead elements of black culture that are more responsible for the social problems faced by black Americans several decades after the Civil Rights Movement. Specifically, McWhorter points to anti-intellectualism, separatism, and a self-perpetuated identity of victimhood as factors limiting them as a group."}
{"text":"The book was a \"New York Times\" bestseller and received mixed reactions. McWhorter considers it the work that first made him known to larger audiences and contributed to the perception of him being a conservative commentator."}
{"text":"The Covenant with Black America is a 2006 political, non-fiction book edited by the American talk-show host and writer Tavis Smiley. Its theme is power relations between Black and White Americans. In 2006, the anthology was listed as The New York Times' number one bestseller. Smiley has stated that this was one of his goals for the book and by placing on the list it would make people discuss the book and its contents, as it would \"force everyone to talk about it\"."}
{"text":"The book consists of a collection of ten essays written by scholars and activists who are fighting to balance the scale between White and Black America. They offer a call to action for Black Americans, filled with \"practical advice\", to close the gap between them and White America. The overall message of the anthology recalls the 1970s campaigns of Jesse Jackson\u201d The anthology's ultimate goal was to help Black America gain social, economic, and political power because without that power, the disparities between Black and White America will continue to grow."}
{"text":"\"The Covenant\"s ten essays, all focused on different areas of social and political disparities, offer theories to help alleviate these disparities. Listed as \"Covenants\", the ten essays are as follows: \u201cSecuring the Right to Health Care and Wellbeing,\u201d \u201cEstablishing a System of Public Education in Which All Children Achieve at High Levels and Reach Their Full Potential,\u201d \u201cCorrecting the System of Unequal Justice,\u201d \u201cFostering Accountable Community-Centered Policing,\u201d \u201cEnsuring Broad Access to Affordable Neighborhoods That Connect to Opportunity,\u201d \u201cClaiming Our Democracy,\u201d \u201cStrengthening Our Rural Roots,\u201d \u201cAccessing Good Jobs, Wealth, and Economic Prosperity,\u201d \u201cAssuring Environmental Justice for All,\u201d and \u201cClosing the Racial Digital Divide.\u201d Cornel West concludes the book with a final call to action."}
{"text":"I: \"Securing the Right to Health Care and Wellbeing\"."}
{"text":"As the sixteenth Surgeon General of the United States, Satcher defines health as reflective of both mind and body. In this essay, he elucidates the needs of Black America to have a culture between healthcare provider and patient; in addition, he focuses on the disproportionate representation of Black America in the healthcare system and justice system."}
{"text":"II: \"Establishing a System of Public Education in Which All Children Achieve at High Level and Reach Their Full Potential\"."}
{"text":"Edmund Gordon illuminates, in this essay, the relationship between educational opportunity with \"race, ethnicity, gender, etc.\" He attributes this the title of the \"Black-White achievement gap.\""}
{"text":"III: \"Correcting the System of Unequal Justice\"."}
{"text":"As the president (and founder) of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, an institute to help communities (like Black America) reach equality, James Bell advocates for justice within the juvenile system and adult justice system in his essay. He calls for help in liberating the members of the Black community that have been imprisoned by the \"flawed justice system.\""}
{"text":"V: \"Ensuring Broad Access to Affordable Neighborhoods That Connect to Opportunity\"."}
{"text":"By Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald & Sarah Bobrow-Williams."}
{"text":"VIII: \"Accessing Good Jobs, Wealth, and Economic Prosperity\"."}
{"text":"The Journal of African American Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of African American studies. The journal is edited by Judson L. Jeffries (The Ohio State University) and published quarterly by Springer."}
{"text":"The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Scopus, Academic Search Premier, IBZ Online, Social services abstracts, and Sociological abstracts."}
{"text":"The journal has a 2019 SCImago Journal Rank of 0.174."}
{"text":"The Journal of African American History, formerly The Journal of Negro History (1916\u20132001), is a quarterly academic journal covering African-American life and history. It was founded in 1916 by Carter G. Woodson. The journal is owned and overseen by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and was established in 1916 by Woodson and Jesse E. Moorland. The journal publishes original scholarly articles on all aspects of the African-American experience. The journal annually publishes more than sixty (60) reviews of recently published books in the fields of African and African-American life and history. As of 2018, the \"Journal\" is published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the ASALH."}
{"text":"Woodson and the Journal's impact on Black History Month."}
{"text":"\"The Journal of African American History\" is owned by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. In 2018, the editor V. P. Franklin, who began working for his alma mater, Harvard University along with Harvard's Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a well-known historian in African-American studies decided to sign a deal with the University of Chicago Press to have it publish the journal on behalf of the ASLAH."}
{"text":"Pero. G. Dagbovie is an acclaimed history professor at Michigan State University focused primarily on black history, black women's history, and Black Power. He is also a well known author of countless books including African American History Reconsidered and the biography of Carter G. Woodson, the founder of \"The Journal of African American History\". Because of Dagbovie's work and his unique background on African-American history, he has been appointed as the next editor of the Journal, replacing V.P Franklin."}
{"text":"As mentioned above, \"The Journal of African American History\" was essential for starting the effort to document and fill the need for the study of black history. However, it also gave black scholars opportunities to challenge the status quo, fight stereotypes, and attempt to create a more favorable perception of African Americans. It also gave people of color the chance to publish their works and be recognized in the academic field. It really encouraged and fostered the academic success of black Americans, especially black historians."}
{"text":"The Journal of Negro Education is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Howard University, established in 1932 by Charles Henry Thompson, who was its editor-in-chief for more than 30 years. The journal's aim is to identify and define the problems that characterize the education of Black people in the United States and elsewhere, to provide a forum for analysis and solutions, and to serve as a vehicle for sharing statistics and research on a national basis. Ivory A. Toldson has served as editor-in-chief since 2008."}
{"text":"The journal lists three aims as its mission: first, to stimulate the collection and facilitate the dissemination of facts about the education of Black people; second, to present discussions involving critical appraisals of the proposals and practices relating to the education of Black people; and third, to stimulate and sponsor investigations of issues incident to the education of Black people."}
{"text":"Notable contributors in the fields of education, sociology, history, and other disciplines over the years have included Horace Mann Bond, Ralph J. Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, James P. Comer, W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Edmund W. Gordon, Robert J. Havighurst, Dorothy Height, Dwight O. W. Holmes, Charles S. Johnson, Alain Locke, Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin E. Mays, James Nabrit, Jr., Dorothy B. Porter, and others."}
{"text":"The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore"}
{"text":"The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore is a three-volume set of books published in December 2005 by Greenwood Press. It contains roughly 700 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 100 contributors. It serves as a comprehensive overview of all aspects of African-American folklore, including folktales, music, foodways, spiritual beliefs, and art."}
{"text":"\"The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore\" is unique in being the definitive encyclopedia relating to African-American traditions, background, and mores; a comprehensive overview of African-American culture and folklore. It contains alphabetically arranged entries and expert contributors on topics such as folktales, music, art, foodways, spiritual beliefs, proverbs, and many other subjects. Entries cite works for further reading and the encyclopedia concludes with a bibliography of major works."}
{"text":"The set of books also gives attention to the Caribbean and African roots of traditional African-American culture. The three volumes are intended to help scholars and students understand the heart of African-American culture and provides a comprehensive context for African-American history, literature, music, and art."}
{"text":"\"The fact that more than 100 entries are devoted to scholars and collectors, among them Imamu Amiri Baraka, Zora Neale Hurston, and Melville J. Herskovits, supports a statement Prahlad makes in the introduction. The encyclopedia seeks 'to provide a significant overview of the current study of African American folklore... [This] first comprehensive general reference work' on African American folklore is highly recommended for academic and public libraries.\""}
{"text":"\"The multidisciplinary nature of folklore studies is reflected in the list of 140 or so primarily academic contributors, whose areas of expertise include art, literature, anthropology, religion, and more...(the entries) make fascinating reading on topics as diverse as samba, the Sea Islands, sermons, Tupac Shakur, Stagolee, and the steel pan drum...\""}
{"text":"The Nigger Bible is a book by Robert H. deCoy, originally self-published by deCoy and then reissued by Holloway House in 1967, and again in 1972 (). Described as a \"key statement\" in the Black Power movement, it is a social and linguistic analysis of the word \"nigger\" and of the origins and contemporary circumstances of the black peoples of America."}
{"text":"The form is varied and might be described as a series of reflections. In the preface, Dick Gregory (whose autobiography was entitled \"Nigger\") writes: \"In abolishing and rejecting the Caucasian-Christian philosophical and literary forms while recording his 'Black Experiences,' this writer has removed himself from their double-standard, hypocritical frames of reference\"."}
{"text":"It attempts to tease apart the cultural, philosophical, and scriptural origins of what the author calls an \"Alabaster Man\", one that experienced the conclusions and prejudices at the root of their oppression. It examines, among other texts, the Christian bible and its terminology. the book explores the power of words, and re-interprets and critiques core western religious and philosophical constructs, including those that are central to much of the modern African-American religious experience. In one of the chapters he discusses \"the genealogy of Jody Grind\"; Eugene B. Redmond remarks deCoy is one of many African-American writers who \"continues a tradition by seeking out folk epics and ballads as sources of poetry\"."}
{"text":"DeCoy re-examines the word \"nigger\", demystifies it, and attempts to embed critical thinking skills about black personality types and categories. The author deconstructs the Christianity of \"Niggers\" (including, in his view, Black Muslims) as well as the values of the New Left. The book contains an analysis of the cultural and racial significance of Mardi Gras."}
{"text":"DeCoy also published \"Cold Black Preach\" (1971, ). \"The Black Scholar\" summarized: \"Noted author of the explosive best seller \"The Nigger Bible\" takes on the black preaching establishment\"."}
{"text":"The Minds of Marginalized Black Men is a non-fiction book written by Alford A. Young Jr. Young explores the lives of impoverished young black men living in the near New West Side of Chicago, Illinois, in order to get a better understanding of how they view their lives and what they want for their futures. The book was first published in 2004 by Princeton University Press."}
{"text":"The book received a generally positive reception, garnering reviews from academic journals including \"Contemporary Sociology\", \"Gender & Society\", \"Journal of Urban Affairs\", and the \"American Journal of Sociology\"."}
{"text":"Larry - A 24-year-old male who has never held a full-time job for longer than a month or two. Because he cannot find and hold a job he still lives at home with his parents and siblings."}
{"text":"Devin - A 21-year-old active gang member who is on parole for possession of narcotics. He has been a part of many illicit activities such as selling drugs and theft. Devin has never held any form of a job in his life."}
{"text":"Casey - A 25-year-old ex-convict who just got out of drug rehabilitation for an addiction that started when he was a teenager. He had a job as a bag boy at a local supermarket but besides that the majority of his income came from hustling and drug dealing."}
{"text":"Lester - Grew up with both parents, and had a plan to excel in his future. Unfortunately his parents were criminals, and once his father was incarcerated he had to stop focusing on school and start focusing on survival. It was then that he resorted to becoming a drug dealer."}
{"text":"Earl - Comes from a family that was unfamiliar with college because nobody was fortunate enough to have experienced it. He moved to Near West from Mississippi, and was often teased and picked on as an adolescent. Eventually Earl found a sense of security from being an outsider by joining a gang."}
{"text":"Jake - Was one of few to receive his high school diploma. Unfortunately, college was out of the question as his family did not have the finances to help him out. Eventually Jake fell into the easy money-making system of drug dealing."}
{"text":"Barry - He stayed away from gangs growing up, and was able to receive his high school diploma, but he got caught up in drug dealing to make quick and easy cash during the summer shortly following his graduation. He eventually stopped when the police were catching on to him, and drug dealing gangs wanted him dead."}
{"text":"Donald - Worked many different jobs during his adolescent years, but was unable to keep any of them for very long. Eventually being desperate for money led him down the path of drug dealing."}
{"text":"Gus - A high school football star who had plans to participate in the army. Unfortunately his addiction to cocaine hurt his athleticism, and got him kicked out of the military. He eventually came back to Near West, where he began dealing drugs."}
{"text":"Tito - A survivor of Near West Side who was able to work with a moving company for a short period of time. Eventually he began gangbanging, and was incarcerated."}
{"text":"Introduction - Making New Sense of Poor Black Men in Crisis"}
{"text":"The introduction gives insight on what is to come later in the book. It also describes the setting and how Young did his research."}
{"text":"Young conducted his research in several public housing developments in the Near West Side of Chicago. Young describes the area as \"geographically and socially isolated from downtown Chicago and the opulent western suburbs, and resembles a holding pen for the economically immobile.\""}
{"text":"The first development that Young went to was the Governor Henry Horner Homes. The development had \"19 buildings with 1,774 units, almost all of which are occupied by African Americans.\" In these households over 85% received public assistance, and only 8% were able to be supported by the employment of a member of the household."}
{"text":"The second development was the ABLA homes located one and a half miles away from the Henry Horner Homes. This development contains 160 buildings with 3,505 units and, like the Henry Horner homes, is almost all African-American. ABLA occupants do a little better financially, with 75% needing public assistance and just over 8% able to support themselves."}
{"text":"The second half of the introduction talks about what made Young want to research and write this book and what the main themes of the book are. Young says that the main goal of this book is to \"uncover these men's worldviews on issues such as mobility, opportunity, and future life chances.\" The book is not about what was going through these men's heads when they were dealing drugs or carrying a firearm but instead about how they view their place in American society and what they think about their futures."}
{"text":"Chapter 1 - The Past and Future of the Cultural Analysis of Black Men"}
{"text":"Chapter 1 starts off by going into the idea of \"the crisis of the black male\", which is the idea that the rate of crime and incarceration among blacks is directly connected to their high rate of unemployment. Young attributes the crisis to two key factors: structural factors such as race-based residential segregations and mobility prospect, and cultural factors such as attitudes and behaviors that prevent acceptance into the work world."}
{"text":"Young then talks about how most research on poor black males only focuses on behavioral traits and their value systems. He says that good research would also include a deep analysis of how these men create their worldviews and beliefs regarding the present and future. Cultural analysis is the topic of a huge debate right now. On one side \"the debate asks whether black men adopt or promote distinct cultural patters that contribute to, if not cause altogether, their demise.\""}
{"text":"The other side questions \"whether these men, who are taken to be cultural actors in the ways that other groups of Americans are, might simply experience unique life circumstances and conditions that overdetermine the social outcomes comprising their everyday lives.\" Young then finishes off the chapter talking about \"social isolation\" which is the idea that these poor young black men are unable to get jobs because their class standing keeps them away from mainstream society. They are isolated from the areas where the jobs and opportunities are."}
{"text":"Chapter 2 - Time, Space, and Everyday Living"}
{"text":"Chapter 2 looks at the everyday lives of these men. Uncertainty is a common feeling for them because each day they must worry about whether they will have a job or even make it through the day. One thing in this chapter that really surprised Young was the men's inability to manage time. They would show up late, extremely early, or even on the wrong days to interviews. These men do not have to deal with appointments on an everyday basis because on the majority of their days they have nothing to do, so they do not know how to handle appointments."}
{"text":"Young brings up the concept of \"Habitus\", which is a \"system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.\" Essentially, the way people think and act is related to the social constraints and structures around them."}
{"text":"Young gives the example of how the use of violence in order to defend oneself is a justifiable in certain situations. Young was surprised by how much these people have to deal with violence. He talks about how in most communities violence is rare but in the Near West Side it has become part of the daily lives of the people. Most people only feel unsafe when they go out late at night but people in the Near West Side fear violence all day, even in their own homes."}
{"text":"Coming Up Poor addresses the issue of young African-American men developing their futures through the obstacles of growing up in Near West Side. The most common obstacles that most of the men experienced were the lack of decent finances, a father figure, a sense of security, and the proper information to lead them to college. Young men are interviewed and asked to describe what it was like trying to grow up in the community and what kind of support they received from their family to pursue an education beyond high school."}
{"text":"Some parents overprotected their children to the point where the children would sneak out to the streets and be exposed to gang violence. One often found a sense of safety and security only in joining a gang to avoid being the recipient of a soft reputation. To find security in the streets one had to gain the respect of one's peers. When kids are bullying, stealing, and dealing drugs when in elementary school, the future for that generation is limited to those who can stay away and deal with the conflicts another way. The local high school had an enrollment of 97 percent African Americans, and during the 1980s the percent who received a high school diploma only ranged from 15 percent to no more than 30 percent."}
{"text":"The high school could not provide what one would call a safe and educational learning environment for many different reasons. During daily instruction students would have to halt their studies and duck beneath their desks because of gunfire in the streets. With instability such as this one can only imagine the quality of an education that a student could receive, which is why the percent of students who went on to attend college ranged from 10 percent to no more than 40 percent. This does not mean that those eligible to go to college were able to afford it, considering that 95 percent of the students came from low-income families that needed financial assistance to survive."}
{"text":"Once these boys became men and were still stuck in the city, they believed that they had survived the most challenging part of growing up. Now they were off to the workforce, where many were unable to keep steady jobs. With the morals and mindsets that the men had acquired growing up, they faced difficulty keeping their jobs as they valued the respect of their employees more than the importance of getting the job done. The men are extremely affected by their adolescent years and are now struggling to provide for children of their own. This cycle seems to continue as the elders always stress the importance of a quality education; the only challenge is learning how to get it."}
{"text":"Chapter 4 - Framing Social Reality: Stratification and Inequality"}
{"text":"Chapter 4 focuses on determining what the men's interpretive thoughts are on characteristics of society such as power, hierarchy, and social relations across race and class lines. The author mainly focuses on each of the men's personal experiences. By analyzing their differences in opinions, the author strives to figure out how differences in personal experiences connect to the kinds of interpretations that the men have."}
{"text":"Donald, another man who was interviewed, had a completely different outlook on these questions. Donald grew up working small jobs at a variety of businesses and although he was not a part of the wealthier society, he viewed it from his position. He stated that he witnessed racism and discrimination all the time, and he believes that was why he was fired from some of his jobs. He believes that as long as there are different wealth classes these unfortunate aspects of society are always going to remain."}
{"text":"Chapter 5 - Framing Individual Mobility and Attainment"}
{"text":"Chapter 5 addresses the recurring thoughts about how low-income African-American men make sense of mobility and attainment in American society. Its main focus is to help determining what we can do to enhance these men's thoughts on advancement in society. Through the information acquired during the interviews, it seems as though the men's ability to imagine aspects of life that are present further out in society such as mobility barriers and discrimination are often limited by what they have experienced in Near West Side."}
{"text":"The men were asked about their thoughts of mobility and attainment in the country, and they were mostly split into two categories. Those who knew little about it and did not have much to say, and those who had passionate responses towards why they believed there were barriers and discrimination in society. Half of the men had not been fortunate enough to have a job because of their lack of motivation or qualifications."}
{"text":"These men who had always been unemployed were least likely to speak of the role that outside forces play in shaping a person's chances in life. On the other hand, the men that were a part of some sort of employment had completely different thoughts on mobility and attainment. Often, the men with more work experience had experienced social conflicts themselves and were able to talk thoroughly about their beliefs on how the role of external factors affect an individual's chances in life."}
{"text":"Chapter 6 - Looking Up from Below: Framing Personal Reality"}
{"text":"Chapter 6 focuses on self-identification: discovering and stating who you are as a person; understanding what you want your mission in life and goals to be; and how to mobilize oneself in society in order to achieve these goals. Different aspects of the stereotypical ideal future or \"good life\" are mentioned. This ideal future mentioned touches on the three spheres of life: work, home, and individual well-being. In this stage of self-identification, a specific profession is not addressed; instead the goal is to attain whatever fits the individual's definition of a well-paying job."}
{"text":"There is a strong emphasis on personal mobility and opportunity as the basis for aspirations or the 'ideal\" future. The author touches on the essential points of using any resources that are possible in order to mobilize yourself on a small scale, and to in time give yourself and opportunity on a larger scale. An example given is of Arthur working at a liquor store to get an idea of how to set up his own business. The author analyzes the men's lack of social capital in the world of work, and says the men are disadvantaged in the human capital of strategic skills and talents."}
{"text":"The world of work is shown as a world of education, brainpower, skill, and credentials, which are resources for success in the working world. The attributes of strength and physical stamina have very little importance in the white-collar environment. The author notes that the men's perceptions of their own skills would limit them to minimally skilled positions."}
{"text":"Chapter 7 - Getting There: Navigating Personal Mobility"}
{"text":"Chapter 7 focuses on aspects of personal mobility, personal impediments to getting ahead, and the special place of race in class. Chapter seven briefly touches on and concludes the men's discussion on the modern-day America and the American Dream. They touch on the emphasizing factors of discipline, hard work, education, and motivation."}
{"text":"The men believe that a high school diploma is a bare essential towards minimal success in the working world, but that the only useful education was direct training to one's career interests. The men then move on to confronting and acknowledging their own self-induced barriers. Men like Gus and Casey talk about their struggles with substance abuse, and the problems that it caused for them regarding motivation and finding work."}
{"text":"The men who had been previously incarcerated such as Devin, Earl, Lester, and Casey, talk about the difficulty of finding work with a criminal record. The men then discuss the difficulty of personal mobility. They discuss how being African-American puts them in a lower class, with fewer resources and opportunities, thus making it harder for them to mobilize and to make something of themselves."}
{"text":"Chapter 8 - Recasting the Crisis of Poor Black Men"}
{"text":"Chapter 8 starts off with some funny yet interesting words from a man by the name of Vance Smith. Smith said: \"That's retarded to think that [black men do not know how to take control of their lives]. People actually think like that? I mean, people with Ph.D's and shit.\" People who think that black men cannot be responsible for their lives are extremely wrong. This book has shown us that these poor black men have plans to improve themselves and have hopes and dreams they just lack the skills and capital to better themselves. They are many things that need to be done before these people can live better lives."}
{"text":"A key one would be a stable labor market with good job training. But the likelihood of that happening is small because the majority of people view this community with the idea of \"three strikes and you're out.\" That these people had their chance and chose to cheat and therefore put themselves in the situation that they are in and we should not have to help them. The last main point in the book is that as times change and their situation changes the way researchers and people view that area needs to change with it otherwise they will never be able to get out of the hole that they are in."}
{"text":"The Rich and the Rest of Us"}
{"text":"The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto is a 2012 political, non-fiction book written by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. The book examines poverty in America and how to eliminate it."}
{"text":"Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America is a 2017 non-fiction book by Michael Eric Dyson."}
{"text":"A look into the state of race relations in the United States, delivered as \"a hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide, directed specifically to a white congregation.\""}
{"text":"The book grapples with the social construct of \"whiteness\" and challenges the readers to \"reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in the complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings.\" Dyson's 'sermon' addresses \"five dysfunctional ways that those regarded as white respond when confronted with the reality that whiteness is simultaneously artificial and powerful,\" as well as \"dysfunctional ways that black people sometimes respond to white racism.\""}
{"text":"Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted."}
{"text":"Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution is a history book by Simon Schama. It was the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for general nonfiction. A 2007 drama-documentary television programme was based on it."}
{"text":"\"Rough Crossings\" gives an account of the history of thousands of African-American slaves who escaped slavery in the American colonies to fight for the British cause during the American Revolutionary War. It tells of the legal battles which established that slavery was not valid in England itself, and how the British government offered freedom to enslaved African Americans if they would fight for Britain and King George III. The book discusses the many ambiguities involved\u2014some white Loyalists were slaveowners, some blacks were recruited for the War of Independence."}
{"text":"\"Rough Crossings\" then follows the fate of the Black Loyalists after the war's end, who, following the British defeat, were sent to Nova Scotia (then still a colony within British North America), where they received a cold welcome, including suffering the first race riots on the continent. Some remained in Nova Scotia, but others returned to Africa to settle in what was to become Sierra Leone. The descendants of those who settled in Freetown are part of the Sierra Leone Creole people, with strong ancestral ties with the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada."}
{"text":"The early chapters of Rough Crossings still bear traces of the television habit - the scene-setting rhetoric, a tendency to over-emphasis [sic] vivid 'moments', precise character thumbnail ... As the book weaves through London, America, Nova Scotia and Africa, though, Schama's technique relaxes, to be laid, most strikingly, at the service of the book's black characters. ... At the end of this immaculately controlled, brave and important work, only the most callous of readers could fail to shed a tear."}
{"text":"James Walvin, in his \"Guardian\" review, stated:"}
{"text":"Parts of the story have been well rehearsed by earlier historians, but never like this. One of Schama's great talents is the ability to fit together distinct episodes into a much broader and more telling narrative. He also brings to the story his characteristic flair and historical imagination."}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" Brent Staples praised the book as well, describing it as \"a stirringly ambitious reconsideration of the Revolution with the question of slavery set at the very heart of the matter\"."}
{"text":"In 2007, BBC Two aired the drama-documentary \"Rough Crossings\", based on Schama's book. A reviewer stated that the \"success of this endeavour is unfortunately limited as the programme fails to inform its audience which this history should be remembered apart from its perceived strangeness and neglect\". \"The programme's weakness in delivering an effective message is also let down in its use of Schama's pieces to camera and the dramatic reconstructions of the story.\" The two halves of the production, with \"different styles\", \"do not sit well together\"."}
{"text":"It was released to DVD by BBC Home Entertainment."}
{"text":"In 2007, Headlong Theatre produced a stage adaptation, adapted by Caryl Phillips, which toured the UK. \"The British Theatre Guide\" review stated, \"This play attempts to take a big book with many strands and meld them into a satisfying three hour play\", but \"is too diffuse to make for a coherent drama\"."}
{"text":"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"}
{"text":"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography describing the early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of \"Caged Bird\", Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice."}
{"text":"Angelou was challenged by her friend, author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature. Reviewers often categorize \"Caged Bird\" as autobiographical fiction because Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, but the prevailing critical view characterizes it as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand. The book covers topics common to autobiographies written by black American women in the years following the Civil Rights Movement: a celebration of black motherhood; a critique of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition."}
{"text":"\"Caged Bird\" was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on \"The New York Times\" paperback bestseller list for two years. It has been used in educational settings from high schools to universities, and the book has been celebrated for creating new literary avenues for the American memoir. However, the book's graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality has caused it to be challenged or banned in some schools and libraries."}
{"text":"When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title. According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them. Angelou has credited Dunbar, along with Shakespeare, with forming her \"writing ambition\". The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem \"Sympathy\":"}
{"text":"I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,When he beats his bars and would be free;It is not a carol of joy or glee,But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings \u2013 I know why the caged bird sings."}
{"text":"\"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\" follows Marguerite's (called \"My\" or \"Maya\" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces \u2013 particularly with racism \u2013 in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (Momma) and disabled uncle (Uncle Willie) in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book \u2013 they travel alone and are labeled like baggage."}
{"text":"A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps. He takes the two children with him when he departs, but leaves them with their mother in St. Louis, Missouri. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. He is found guilty during the trial, but escapes jail time and is murdered, presumably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after returning to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, \"the aristocrat of Black Stamps,\" who encourages her through books and communication to regain her voice and soul. This coaxes Maya out of her shell."}
{"text":"Later, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California, to protect them from the dangers of racism in Stamps. Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she becomes the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer and has some experiences pivotal to her development. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time after a fight with her father's girlfriend."}
{"text":"During Maya's final year of high school, she worries that she might be a lesbian (which she confuses due to her sexual inexperience with the belief that lesbians are also hermaphrodites). She ultimately initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. She becomes pregnant, which on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. Maya gives birth at the end of the book."}
{"text":"Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African-American autobiography. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including \"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\", as autobiographical fiction. Other critics, like Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies."}
{"text":"\"Caged Bird\" has been called \"perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era\". Critic Pierre A. Walker expresses a similar sentiment, and places it in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the Black community of Stamps, as well as her presentation of vivid and realistic racist characters and \"the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans\", her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society. Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with \"Caged Bird\", contain a sequence of lessons about resisting oppression. The sequence she describes leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from \"helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest\"."}
{"text":"Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives her autobiographies their thematic unity and underscores one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. For example, in Angelou's depiction of the \"powhitetrash\" incident, Maya reacts with rage, indignation, humiliation, and helplessness, but Momma teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism, and that it is an effective basis for actively protesting and combating racism. Walker calls Momma's way a \"strategy of subtle resistance\" and McPherson calls it \"the dignified course of silent endurance\"."}
{"text":"Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape to that of Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\". Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of African Americans; Jacobs uses the metaphor to critique slaveholding culture, while Angelou uses it to first internalize, then challenge, twentieth-century racist conceptions of the Black female body (namely, that the Black female is physically unattractive). Rape, according to Vermillion, \"represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words\"."}
{"text":"Angelou was also powerfully affected by slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and other autobiographies. Angelou read through the Bible twice as a young child, and memorized many passages from it. African-American spirituality, as represented by Angelou's grandmother, has influenced all of Angelou's writings, in the activities of the church community she first experiences in Stamps, in the sermonizing, and in scripture. Hagen goes on to say that in addition to being influenced by rich literary form, Angelou has also been influenced by oral traditions. In \"Caged Bird\", Mrs. Flowers encourages her to listen carefully to \"Mother Wit\", which Hagen defines as the collective wisdom of the African-American community as expressed in folklore and humor."}
{"text":"\"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\" is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to \"Caged Bird.\" It became a bestseller immediately after it was published. Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book \"liberates the reader into life\" and called it \"a Biblical study of life in the midst of death\". According to Angelou's biographers, \"Readers, especially women, and in particular Black women, took the book to heart\"."}
{"text":"By the end of 1969, critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other Black autobiographers. Poet James Bertolino asserts that \"Caged Bird\" \"is one of the essential books produced by our culture\". He insists that \"[w]e should all read it, especially our children\". It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, has never been out of print, and has been published in many languages. It has been a Book of the Month Club selection and an Ebony Book Club selection. In 2011, \"Time Magazine\" placed the book in its list of 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923."}
{"text":"Critic Robert A. Gross called \"Caged Bird\" \"a \"tour de force\" of language\". Edmund Fuller insisted that Angelou's intellectual range and artistry were apparent in how she told her story. \"Caged Bird\" catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim, was a significant development in Black women's literature in that it \"heralded the success of other now prominent writers\". Other reviewers have praised Angelou's use of language in the book, including critic E. M. Guiney, who reported that \"Caged Bird\" was \"one of the best autobiographies of its kind that I have read\". Critic R. A. Gross praised Angelou for her use of rich and dazzling images."}
{"text":"Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book \"Stories of Resilience in Childhood\", analyzed the events in \"Caged Bird\" to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener states that Angelou's book provides a useful framework for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did. Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has used \"Caged Bird\" to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He has called the book a highly effective tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts."}
{"text":"\"Caged Bird\" has been criticized by many parents, causing it to be removed from school curricula and library shelves. The book was approved to be taught in public schools and was placed in public school libraries through the U.S. in the early-1980s, and was included in advanced placement and gifted student curricula, but attempts by parents to censor it began in 1983. It has been challenged in fifteen U.S. states. Educators have responded to these challenges by removing it from reading lists and libraries, by providing students with alternatives, and by requiring parental permission from students. Some have been critical of its sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions."}
{"text":"\"Caged Bird\" appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990\u20132000, sixth on the ALA's 2000\u20132009 list, and one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms."}
{"text":"The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, is an autobiography by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in which he recounts his experiences as growing up as a gay African American man, as well as some of his time in an interracial and open marriage with Marilyn Hacker. It describes encounters with Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael and Storm\u00e9 DeLarverie, a dinner with W. H. Auden, and a phone call to James Baldwin."}
{"text":"Among many cultural events of the decade that he witnessed, Delany recounts his attendance at the first New York City performance of artist Allan Kaprow's \"18 Happenings in 6 Parts\", the 1959 performance piece that, for many, marks the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism. In section 17.4 of the University of Minnesota Press edition, he describes the event and its venue, and speculates on its artistic significance. The introduction puts an emphasis on the idea of the unreliable narrator; Delany's accounts often contrast his life as it \"felt\" to ways in which it actually occurred."}
{"text":"Hazel Carby called it one of two contemporary autobiographies that are \"absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood\" (the other being that of Miles Davis)."}
{"text":"In the chapter, \"The Future Is in the Present\" of the book \"Cruising Utopia\" by Jos\u00e9 Esteban Munoz, Delany's \"The Motion of Light in the Water\" serves to explain how the future, as a formed of utopia, can be \"glimpsed\" in the present through what Delany employed as \"the massed bodies\" of sexual dissidence."}
{"text":"Masha Gessen in O, The Oprah Magazine selected this title as a pick for the \"Best LGBTQ Books of All Time,\" describing it as \"a textbook in observing the self, thinking about sex and love, and the best writing manual I know.\""}
{"text":"The first edition is subtitled \"1957\u20131965\", the revised 1993 edition is subtitled \"1960\u20131965\"."}
{"text":"Live from Death Row, published in May 1995, is a memoir by Mumia Abu-Jamal, an American journalist and activist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is known for having been convicted of the murder of a city police officer and sentenced to death in 1982, in a trial that Amnesty International suspected of lacking impartiality. Abu-Jamal wrote this book while on death row. He has always maintained his innocence. Publishers Addison-Wesley paid Abu-Jamal a $30,000 advance for the book."}
{"text":"Reports that Abu-Jamal would be paid for the book resulted in protests. In a case decided in Federal appeals court, it ruled that he had the right to be paid for commentary and writings. This is the first of several books that he has published which were completed in prison. His sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole in 2011, after he had been held for 29 years on death row."}
{"text":"A former Black Panther, Abu-Jamal recalls some of his past experiences with the organization; his one-time role as bodyguard for Huey P. Newton, whom he regards as a hero; the feuding between the Newton-led West Coast members and the Eldridge Cleaver-led East Coast and, ultimately, its decline. He recounts his protest of a George Wallace rally with three other black teens, their subsequent beatings at the hands of white attendees, and his appeal for help to a police officer. The man kicked him in the face while he was on the ground."}
{"text":"Abu-Jamiah frequently refers to the MOVE organization, its founder John Africa, and the massacre of 11 people (5 of them children) in a bombing attack on May 13, 1985 and fire caused by the Philadelphia Police Department. He compares this to the Waco siege, which resulted in 82 deaths. He also explores the 1992 trial of Los Angeles officers for the beating of Rodney King, and riots in the city after the officers were acquitted. He said that he believed each of the indicted officers had their constitutional right of double jeopardy violated by being twice put on trial for the same offense."}
{"text":"Abu-Jamal structures the book as anecdotes, most exploring the prison system. In an end section titled \"Musings, memories, and prophecies\", he discusses past events in his life, and he commemorates some prominent black people in America."}
{"text":"Abu-Jamal had started providing commentaries to Prison Radio and other outlets. Addison-Wesley paid Abu-Jamal a $30,000 advance for the book."}
{"text":"The notoriety of Abu-Jamal for his case and protests related to his book deal resulted in considerable coverage of this book at publication."}
{"text":"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave"}
{"text":"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States."}
{"text":"\"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass\" encompasses eleven chapters that recount Douglass's life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man. It contains two introductions by well-known white abolitionists: a preface by William Lloyd Garrison, and a letter by Wendell Phillips, both arguing for the veracity of the account and the literacy of its author."}
{"text":"Douglass begins by explaining that he does not know the date of his birth (he later chose February 14, 1818), and that his mother died when he was 7 years old. He has very few memories of her (children were commonly separated from their mothers), only of the rare nighttime visit. He thinks his father is a white man, possibly his owner. At a very early age he sees his Aunt Hester being whipped. Douglass details the cruel interaction that occurs between slaves and slaveholders, as well as how slaves are supposed to behave in the presence of their masters, and even when Douglass says that fear is what kept many slaves what they were, for when they told the truth they were punished by their owners."}
{"text":"At the age of ten or eleven, Douglass's master dies and his property is left to be divided between the master's son and daughter. The slaves are valued along with the livestock, causing Douglass to develop a new hatred of slavery. He feels lucky when he is sent back to Baltimore to live with the family of Master Hugh."}
{"text":"He is then moved through a few situations before he is sent to St. Michael's. His regret at not having attempted to run away is evident, but on his voyage he makes a mental note that he traveled in the North-Easterly direction and considers this information to be of extreme importance. For some time, he lives with Master Thomas Auld who is particularly cruel, even after attending a Methodist camp. Douglass is pleased when he eventually is lent to Mr. Covey for a year, simply because he would be fed. Mr. Covey is known as a \"negro-breaker\", who breaks the will of slaves."}
{"text":"Giant Steps: The Autobiography of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Bantam Books, 1983) is a best-selling book by basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Written with former \"Crawdaddy\" magazine editor Peter Knobler, it covers Abdul-Jabbar's career, his conversion to Islam, his social growth, and his feelings about American racial politics. The title \"Giant Steps\" pays tribute to the 1960 album of the same name by jazz musician John Coltrane."}
{"text":"Gather Together in My Name (1974) is a memoir by American writer and poet Maya Angelou. It is the second book in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The book begins immediately following the events described in \"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\", and follows Angelou, called Rita, from the ages of 17 to 19. Written three years after \"Caged Bird\", the book \"depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime.\" The title of the book is taken from the Bible, but it also conveys how one black female lived in the white-dominated society of the U.S. following the Second World War."}
{"text":"Angelou expands upon many themes that she started discussing in her first autobiography, including motherhood and family, racism, identity, education and literacy. Rita becomes closer to her mother in this book, and goes through a variety of jobs and relationships as she tries to provide for her young son and find her place in the world. Angelou continues to discuss racism in \"Gather Together\", but moves from speaking for all Black women to describing how one young woman dealt with it. The book exhibits the narcissism of young people, but describes how Rita discovers her identity. Like many of Angelou's autobiographies, \"Gather Together\" is concerned with Angelou's on-going self-education."}
{"text":"\"Gather Together\" was not as critically acclaimed as Angelou's first autobiography, but received mostly positive reviews and was recognized as being better written than its predecessor. The book's structure, consisting of a series of episodes tied together by theme and content, parallels the chaos of adolescence, which some critics feel makes it an unsatisfactory sequel to \"Caged Bird\". Rita's many physical movements throughout the book, which affects the book's organization and quality, has caused at least one critic to call it a travel narrative."}
{"text":"The title of \"Gather Together\" is inspired by Matthew 18:19-20: \"Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them\" (King James Version). While Angelou acknowledged the title's biblical origin, she also stated that the title counteracted the tendency of many adults to lie to their children about their pasts. Scholar Sondra O'Neale states that the title is \"a New Testament injunction for the traveling soul to pray and commune while waiting patiently for deliverance\"."}
{"text":"Critic Hilton Als believes that the title of this book may have an additional significance. A prevailing theme in \"Gather Together\" is how one Black female was able to survive in the wider context of post-war America, but it also speaks for all Black women, and how they came to survive in a white-dominated society. Critic Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees: \"The incidents in the book appear merely gathered together in the name of Maya Angelou\"."}
{"text":"The book opens in the years following World War II. Angelou, still known as \"Marguerite,\" or \"Rita,\" has just given birth to her son Clyde, and is living with her mother and stepfather in San Francisco. The book follows Marguerite from the ages of 17 to 19, through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempts to raise her son and to find her place in the world. It continues exploring the themes of Angelou's isolation and loneliness begun in her first volume, and the ways she overcomes racism, sexism, and her continued victimization."}
{"text":"Rita goes from job to job and from relationship to relationship, hoping that \"my charming prince was going to appear out of the blue\". \"My fantasies were little different than any other girl of my age\", Angelou wrote. \"He would come. He would. Just walk into my life, see me and fall everlastingly in love\u00a0... I looked forward to a husband who would love me ethereally, spiritually, and on rare (but beautiful) occasions, physically\"."}
{"text":"Another event of note described in the book was, in spite of \"the strangest audition\", her short stint dancing and studying dance with her partner, R. L. Poole, who became her lover until he reunited with his previous partner, ending Rita's show business career for the time being."}
{"text":"The end of the book finds Rita defeated by life: \"For the first time I sat down defenseless to await life's next assault\". The book ends with an encounter with a drug addict who cared enough for her to show her the effects of his drug habit, which galvanizes her to reject drug addiction and to make something of her life for her and her son."}
{"text":"Halfway through \"Gather Together\", an incident occurs that demonstrates the different ways in which Rita and her grandmother handle racism. Rita, when she is insulted by white clerk during a visit to Stamps, reacts with defiance, but when Momma hears about the confrontation, she slaps Rita and sends her back to California. Rita feels that her personhood was being violated, but the practical Momma knows that her granddaughter's behavior was dangerous. Rita's grandmother is no longer an important influence on her life, and Angelou demonstrates that she had to move on in the fight against racism."}
{"text":"\"Gather Together in My Name\" was not as critically acclaimed as Angelou's first autobiography, but received mostly positive reviews and was recognized as better written. \"Atlantic Monthly's\" reviewer said that the book was \"excellently written\". and \"Choice Magazine\" called Angelou a \"fine story teller\". Cudjoe calls the book \"neither politically nor linguistically innocent\". Although Cudjoe finds \"Gather Together\" a weaker autobiography compared to \"Caged Bird\", he states that Angelou's use of language is \"the work's saving grace\", and that it contains \"a much more consistent and sustained flow of eloquent and honey-dipped writing\"."}
{"text":"Rita's many physical movements throughout the book causes Hagen to call it a travel narrative. According to Lupton, this movement also affects the book's organization and quality, making it a less satisfactory sequel to \"Caged Bird\". Angelou has responded to this criticism by stating that she attempted to capture \"the episodic, erratic nature of adolescence\" as she experienced this period in her life. McPherson agreed, states that \"Gather Together's\" structure is more complex than \"Caged Bird\". Angelou's style in \"Gather Together\" is more mature and simplified, which allows her to better convey emotion and insight through, as McPherson described it, \"sharp and vivid word images\"."}
{"text":"The Bond is an American autobiography published on October 4, 2007 and aimed at young adults. It was written by The Three Doctors. It was their third published novel and is a \"New York Times\" bestseller, making it the third time that The Three Doctors had a bestselling book."}
{"text":"The novel is narrated by each doctor. Each doctor shares their experiences, separately, in each chapter."}
{"text":"The novel is about each of the doctors, who grow up without fathers and share their feelings with the reader. They give the reader advice about how to deal with the situation and how to handle their pain."}
{"text":"An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China is a memoir by Corporal Clarence Adams posthumously published by the University of Massachusetts Press and edited by Della Adams and Louis H. Carlson."}
{"text":"Five other American servicemen are known to have defected to North Korea after the war. They are:"}
{"text":"Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope is a memoir written by John Saunders with bestselling author John U. Bacon, published posthumously on August 8, 2017."}
{"text":"The foreword was written by Mitch Albom."}
{"text":"\"Playing Hurt\" debuted on the \"New York Times\" bestseller list. The book has received positive reviews and Saunders has received praise for his openness and authenticity, with \"Awful Announcing\" calling it an \"important, enlightening read.\" The \"Washington Post\" described the book as, \"dark, edgy, revelatory and quite sad.\""}
{"text":"Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) is a historical memoir written by Timothy B. Tyson. He explores the 1970 murder of Henry D. Marrow, a black man in Tyson's then home town of Oxford, North Carolina. The murder is described as the result of the complicated collision of the Black Power movement and the white backlash against public school integration and other changes brought by the civil rights movement."}
{"text":"Since 2004, the book has sold 160,000 copies. It has earned several awards: the Grawemeyer Award in Religion from the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which had a $200,000 prize, the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction from the Southern Book Critics Circle, the Christopher Award, and the North Caroliniana Book Award from the North Caroliniana Society. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill selected the book for its 2005 summer reading program."}
{"text":"The book was adapted as a movie by the same name, released in 2010. \"Entertainment Weekly\" ranked it on a \"must see\" list."}
{"text":"Tyson has said that the title comes from a slave spiritual later sung as a \"blues lament\", particularly this phrase: \"Ain't you glad, ain't you glad, that the blood done sign my name?\""}
{"text":"The book explores the effects of the 1970 killing of Henry Marrow, a 23-year-old black Vietnam War veteran in Oxford, North Carolina. This is the county seat of Granville County, a center of tobacco culture. Then a town of 10,000, it is located 35 miles north of Durham. Three white men were indicted on charges of murder, but they were acquitted at trial by an all-white jury. Black protests of the killing and acquittal included acts of arson and violence."}
{"text":"Black people organized a protest march to the state capital of Raleigh. In addition, they conducted an 18-month boycott of white businesses in Oxford, a mostly segregated town, to force integration in public facilities. The Marrow case helped galvanize continued African-American civil rights activities in Oxford and across the eastern North Carolina black belt."}
{"text":"Tyson lived as a child in Oxford, where his father was the minister of the prominent Oxford United Methodist Church. He explores not only the white supremacy of the South's racial caste system but his personal and family stories. (His father was driven out of the church because of his support for civil rights.) Tyson interweaves a narrative of the story and its effects on him, with a discussion of the racial history of North Carolina and the United States, and the violent realities of that history on both sides of the color line."}
{"text":"He explores the persistence of discrimination years after passage of federal laws to enforce civil rights, and the more complex aspects of the later civil rights movement."}
{"text":"\"Entertainment Weekly\" praised its \"deadpan, merciless self-examination\" and said it \"pulses with vital paradox... It's a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson's powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.\" Historian Jane Dailey, writing in the \"Chicago Tribune\", called it \"Admirable and unexpected... a riveting story that will have its readers weeping with both laughter and sorrow.\""}
{"text":"The book was adapted as a film written and directed by writer Jeb Stuart. It was released in 2010, starring Ricky Schroder, Omar Benson Miller, and Michael Rooker. It was filmed in the cities of Shelby, Statesville, Monroe and Gastonia, North Carolina. The African-American historian John Hope Franklin has a cameo in the film."}
{"text":"It was also adapted as a play by Mike Wiley, playwright and actor. \"Blood Done Sign My Name\" (2008) premiered at Duke University's Shaefer Theater. It was also produced at the city hall in Oxford, North Carolina on February 13, 2009."}
{"text":"The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream is the second book written by then-Senator Barack Obama. It became number one on both the \"New York Times\" and Amazon.com bestsellers lists in the fall of 2006, after Obama had been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. In the book, Obama expounds on many of the subjects that became part of his 2008 campaign for the presidency. The book advance from the publisher totalled $1.9 million contracted for three books. Obama announced his ultimately successful presidential campaign on February 10, 2007, a little more than three months after the book's release."}
{"text":"While a Senate candidate, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, entitled \"The Audacity of Hope\" that propelled him to national prominence. In the less than twenty minutes it took to deliver the speech, Obama was catapulted to sudden fame, with many analysts predicting that he might be well positioned to enter a future presidential race. In 2006, Obama released \"The Audacity of Hope\", a book-length account that expanded upon many of the same themes he originally addressed in the convention speech."}
{"text":"In his speech addressing the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama said:"}
{"text":"The book, divided into nine chapters, outlines Obama's political and spiritual beliefs, as well as his opinions on different aspects of American culture."}
{"text":"\"The New York Times\" noted that \"Mr. Obama's new book, The Audacity of Hope'\u00a0... is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama's policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.\""}
{"text":"The \"Chicago Tribune\" describes the book as a \"political biography that concentrates on the senator's core values\", and credits the large crowds that gathered at book signings with influencing Obama's decision to run for president. Former presidential candidate Gary Hart describes the book as Obama's \"thesis submission\" for the U.S. presidency: \"It presents a man of relative youth yet maturity, a wise observer of the human condition, a figure who possesses perseverance and writing skills that have flashes of grandeur.\" Reviewer Michael Tomasky writes that it does not contain \"boldly innovative policy prescriptions that will lead the Democrats out of their wilderness\", but does show Obama's potential to \"construct a new politics that is progressive but grounded in civic traditions that speak to a wider range of Americans.\""}
{"text":"An Italian edition was published in April 2007 with a preface by Walter Veltroni, former Mayor of Rome, then leader of Italy's Democratic Party and one of Obama's earliest supporters overseas, who met with Obama in Washington in 2005 and has been referred to as \"Obama's European counterpart\". Spanish and German translations were published in June 2007; the French edition, subtitled \"une nouvelle conception de la politique am\u00e9ricaine\", was published in October 2007. The Croatian edition was published in October 2008."}
{"text":"The book remained on the \"New York Times\" Best Seller list for the 30 weeks since publication. The audiobook version won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album."}
{"text":"A number of blogs and newspapers repeated inaccurate rumors that the book contains the passage, \"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.\" The actual quote does not mention Muslims at all, referring instead to Arab and Pakistani Americans in the context of immigrant communities generally."}
{"text":"Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is a 2019 book by Thomas Chatterton Williams. It was published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 15, 2019."}
{"text":"Thomas, the son of a black father and a white mother, who grew up identifying as black, explains in the book how he has come to unlearn his racial identity."}
{"text":"The book was published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 15, 2019. Williams appeared on \"Real Time with Bill Maher\" on October 18, 2019 to promote the book."}
{"text":"At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the book received a cumulative \"Mixed\" rating based on 11 reviews: 2 \"Rave\" reviews, 3 \"Positive\" reviews, 3 \"Mixed\" reviews, and 3 \"Pan\" reviews."}
{"text":"Working with the Hands by Booker T. Washington is described by its author as a sequel to his classic \"Up From Slavery\"."}
{"text":"The full title of the work is Working with the hands; being a sequel to \"Up From Slavery,\" covering the author's experiences in industrial training at Tuskegee"}
{"text":"Archive.org scan of \"Working with the Hands\""}
{"text":"This autobiography is an important work that combines political manifesto and political philosophy along with the life story of a young African American revolutionary. The book was not universally well received but has had a lasting influence on the black civil rights movement and resonates today in the Black Lives Matter movement."}
{"text":"Huey P. Newton co-founded, with Bobby Seale, and was one of the leaders of, the Black Panther Party (BPP). The party was founded in Oakland California in October 1966 at a time of rising racial tension in the USA. There had been serious race riots in the Harlem area of New York in 1964 and Watts area of Chicago in 1965. Radical black leader Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 at a rally in Harlem."}
{"text":"While he was in prison, he was visited regularly by J. Herman Blake, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. During one visit the idea of writing a book was discussed. The initial idea was that Blake would write a biography of Newton. They began the process while Newton was still in prison. Blake would transcribe their conversations onto a tape recorder immediately after the visits. Following a campaign by supporters, Newton was released in August 1970. Following his release Newton and Blake decided that the book would be an autobiography. The book covered his life from his early days in Oakland up to his trip to China in 1971."}
{"text":"The book goes on to describe his time growing up tough on the streets of Oakland, how he taught himself to read by studying Plato's Republic, his political awakening and the formation of the BPP with Bobby Seale. The next chapters detail the shooting of officer Frey, his trial conviction and later release. The later chapters cover the period after his release and his attempts to rebuild the Party. The last chapters cover his visit to China and what he describes as the \u2018defection\u2019 of Eldredge Cleaver. While Revolutionary Suicide is written in the first person, in an interview in 2007 Blake claims to have done the actual writing."}
{"text":"On its initial publication in 1973 the book was featured on the front page of the book sections of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. This prominence is an indication of the importance of the book at the time although it garnered mixed reviews."}
{"text":"in the New York Times Review of Books, Murray Kempton, wrote a long feature article on the Revolutionary Suicide under the by-line \u2018At one and the same time the goodest and the baddest\u2019. The essay focuses more on Newton himself than his book. Kempton, a broadcaster and critic, is both complementary and highly critical of Newton. The Washington Post review by American author Lee Lockwood in its Bookworld section is positive. In another New York Times review Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes that, while the book was eagerly anticipated, it is \u201dboring\u201d and argues that Newtons main aim in the work is to the change the image of the Panthers."}
{"text":"Ernest M. Collins from the Department of Government at Ohio University wrote a review, which praised Newton's writing when it was \u201cconfined to institutions with which he is familiar\u201d but described his views on the wider political world as \u2018shallow\u2019."}
{"text":"A review in the Times in London by John Arderne Rex called it \u201cperhaps the best written book by a black leader to come out of the United States\u201d. Rex was a Professor of Sociology at University of Warwick and an author. He praises the book for being a mature political philosophy and for Newtons interest in social justice."}
{"text":"Newton's writing and ideas met with a mixed reception. Political scientist John McCartney claimed he was the black power movements foremost political thinker. In his book \u2018Huey P. Newton, the Radical Theorist\u2019 the scholar of African American politics Professor Judson L. Jefferies discussed how Newton's interest in philosophy and his wide reading influenced his thinking. Jefferies said his writing did not compare favourably to Malcolm X or Martin Luther King but praised him as one of the most important black thinkers of the time. Brian Sowers pointed out the influence of Plato's \u2018Republic\u201d on Revolutionary Suicide, particularly the second half of the book, and compares Newton to a modern-day Socrates."}
{"text":"The academic Davi Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University claimed that Newtons rhetoric sat in a tradition mould of conservative rhetoric and he and the Black Panther Party, were not the quite the outsider dangerous force portrayed in the media at the time. Johnson pointed out how Newton used the rhetorical device of jeremiad, a list of complaints about the prevailing society, in a very traditional and conservative way and in that sense his rhetoric was not so revolutionary."}
{"text":"Another academic, Joanna Freer, writing in the journal American Studies, claims that author Thomas Pynchon critiqued Newtons concept of revolutionary suicide in his popular novel \"Gravity's Rainbow\u201d. Freer says that Pynchon through his character Wimpe is critical of Newton's belief in Marxist dialectical materialism and in the idea that revolution was inevitable."}
{"text":"Judson L Jefferies summarised the reviews of Revolutionary Suicide as \u201charsh\u201d. He summarises a number of reviews but points out that in many cases the reviews are focused on Newton and the BPP rather than the book in question. He argues that the authors of these reviews seem to be intent on undermining Newton based on their own idea of who he is rather than giving the book a fair review."}
{"text":"The term \"revolutionary suicide\" was appropriated by Jim Jones, leader of the new religious and socialist movement Peoples Temple. Jones ignored Newton's definition of the phrase, instead using the term to describe actual suicide as a form of revolutionary protest. The term was used by Jones to describe the mass murder\/suicide that took place at Jonestown, Guyana on 18 November 1978. Jones' use of the phrase \"revolutionary suicide,\" as recorded on an audio tape of the mass death, has been widely quoted and used in media coverage of the event."}
{"text":"From 2013 the Black Lives Matter movement rose to prominence in the USA in response to the continuing police brutality against African Americans. Many writers and scholars noted the similarities in the grassroots nature of both the BLM and the BPP and in many of the programs they advocated. Both organisations were formed in Oakland. However, writers also pointed to differences in approach and methods. A key point was that in 2016, 50 years after Newton formed the BPP and forty-three years after the publication of Revolutionary Suicide African American communities were still facing similar issues to those outlined in the book by Newton."}
{"text":"The English musician and singer Julian Cope released an album in 2013 called Revolutionary Suicide. He acknowledged that he took the name from Newtons work and explained how he interpreted the term as being about \u201cultimate freedom\u201d adding\u201d surely we can also be our own hangman if it gets too much?\u201d."}
{"text":"This is followed with an epilogue entitled \u2018I Am We\u201d which Newton says is based on an old African saying. In this he reiterates the difference between revolutionary and reactionary suicide and quotes both Mao's Little Red Book and the Gospel of St. Paul to illustrate his point."}
{"text":"The book's original cover photograph shows Newton sitting on a type of throne holding a rifle and a spear. The image was seen as controversial as it played into the violent imagery which had surrounded the BPP. Early photographs of party members in black shirts and berets carrying weapons shocked many. The photograph is regarded as an iconic image of the counterculture in USA. The image had been produced as a publicity poster for the BPP. The original photographer is unknown. The photograph was described by Bobby Seale as a \u201ccentralized symbol of the leadership of black people in the community\u201d."}
{"text":"The original hardcover edition contained several pages of photographs. These include family photographs, photographs of other panther party leaders and one of Newton with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai taken on his visit to China in September 1971."}
{"text":"The first edition was published in hardcover in 1973 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. New York. This edition did not have an introduction."}
{"text":"In England the publisher was Wildwood House. The book was published in both hardback and paperback editions. . This edition was published with a different cover. It featured a side profile shot of Huey Newton replacing the more controversial enthroned photograph."}
{"text":"In 1995 Writers and Readers published a softcover edition with the original cover photograph."}
{"text":"In September 2009 Penguin books published a paperback edition as part of its Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition series. . The paperback had a deckle edge, a cover illustration by Ho Che Anderson and an introduction by Newton's widow Fredrika Newton. An e-book version was released at the same time."}
{"text":"This book was first released as a serialized work in 1900 through \"The Outlook\", a Christian newspaper of New York. This work was serialized because this meant that during the writing process, Washington was able to hear critiques and requests from his audience and could more easily adapt his paper to his diverse audience."}
{"text":"Washington was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others, criticized some of his views. The book was a best-seller, and remained the most popular African American autobiography until that of Malcolm X. In 1998, the Modern Library listed the book at No. 3 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century, and in 1999 it was also listed by the conservative \"Intercollegiate Review\" as one of the \"50 Best Books of the Twentieth Century\"."}
{"text":"\"Up from Slavery\" chronicles more than forty years of Washington's life: from slave to schoolmaster to the face of southern race relations. In this text, Washington climbs the social ladder through hard, manual labor, a decent education, and relationships with great people. Throughout the text, he stresses the importance of education for the black population as a reasonable tactic to ease race relations in the South (particularly in the context of Reconstruction)."}
{"text":"The book is in essence Washington's traditional, non-confrontational message supported by the example of his life."}
{"text":"\"A Slave Among Slaves\": In the first chapter, the reader is given a vivid yet brief sight of the life of slaves, as seen from the author's point of view. Basically, it speaks of the hardships the slaves endured before independence and their joys and hassles (arguments) after liberty. The first chapter explains about his suffering in that plantation and the end days of his slavery. The author feels that his life had its beginning in midst of the most miserable surroundings."}
{"text":"He explains about his living conditions, and how his mother works hard to make the days end."}
{"text":"\"Boyhood Days\": In the second chapter, the reader learns the importance of naming oneself as a means of reaffirming freedom and the extent to which freed men and women would go to reunite their families. After families had reunited and named themselves, they would then seek out employment (often far from their former masters). The reader learns the story behind the author's name: Booker Taliaferro Washington. The second chapter also gives an account of cruel labour of both adults and children in the mines at the city of Malden."}
{"text":"Furthermore, Booker is strongly attracted towards education and oscillates between the extensive schedule of the day's work and the school. The second chapter also describes the character of Booker's mother and her role in his life."}
{"text":"\"The Struggle for Education\": Washington struggles, in this chapter, to earn enough money to reach and remain at Hampton Institute. That was his first experience related to the importance of willingness to do manual labor. The first introduction of General Samuel C. Armstrong"}
{"text":"\"Helping Others\": Conditions at Hampton are discussed in this chapter, as well as Washington's first trip home from school. He returns early from vacation to aid teachers in the cleaning of their classrooms. When Washington returns the next summer, he is elected to teach local students, young and old, through a night school, Sunday school, and private lessons. This chapter also gives the first mention of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan."}
{"text":"\"The Reconstruction Period (1867-1878)\": Washington paints an image of the South during Reconstruction Era of the United States, with several assessments of Reconstruction projects including: education, vocational opportunities, and voting rights. He speaks of the Reconstruction policy being built on \"a false foundation.\" He seeks to play a role in forming a more solid foundation based upon \"the hand, head, and heart.\""}
{"text":"\"Black Race and Red Race\": General Armstrong calls Washington back to Hampton Institute for the purpose of instructing and advising a group of young Native-American men. Washington speaks about different instances of racism against Native Americans and African Americans. Washington also begins a night school at this time."}
{"text":"\"Early Days at Tuskegee\": Once again General Armstrong is instrumental in encouraging Washington's next project: the establishment of a normal school for African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama. He describes the conditions in Tuskegee and his work in building the school: \"much like making bricks without straw. Washington also outlines a typical day in the life of an African American living in the country at this time."}
{"text":"In May 1881, General Armstrong told Washington he had received a letter from a man in Alabama to recommend someone to take charge of a \"colored school\" in Tuskegee. The man writing the letter thought that there was no \"colored\" person to fill the role and asked him to recommend a white man. The general wrote back to tell him about Washington, and he was accepted for the position."}
{"text":"Washington went there and describes Tuskegee as a town of 2,000 population and as being in the \"Black Belt\" of the South, where nearly half of the residents were \"colored\" and in other parts of nearby counties there were six African-American people to one white person. He explains that he thinks the term 'Black Belt' originated from the rich, dark soil of the area, which was also the part of the South where slaves were most profitable."}
{"text":"Once at Tuskegee, his first task was to find a place to open the school and secured a rundown \"shanty\" and African-American Methodist church. He also travelled around the area and acquainted himself with the local people. He describes some of the families he met and who worked in the cotton fields. He saw that most of the farmers were in debt and schools were generally taught in churches or log cabins and these had few or no provisions. Some, for example, had no means of heating in the winter and one school had one book to share between five children."}
{"text":"He goes on to relate the story of a man aged around 60. He told Washington he had been sold in 1845 and there had been five of them: \"There were five of us; myself and brother and three mules.\" Washington explains he is referring to these experiences to highlight how improvements were later made."}
{"text":"\"Teaching School in a Stable and a Hen-house\": Washington details the necessity of a new form of education for the children of Tuskegee, for the typical New England education would not be sufficient to effect uplift. Here is also the introduction of long-time partners, George W. Campbell and Lewis Adams, and future wife, Olivia A. Davidson; these individuals felt similarly to Washington in that mere book-learning would not be enough. The goal was established to prepare students of Tuskegee to become teachers, farmers, and overall moral people."}
{"text":"Washington's first days at Tuskegee are described in this chapter, as is his method of working. He demonstrates a holistic approach to his teaching in that he researched the area and the people and how poverty stricken many were. His visits also showed how education was both a premium and underfunded, and therefore justifies the setting up of this new facility."}
{"text":"Tuskegee is also seen to be set in a rural area, where agriculture was the main form of employment, and so the institute's later incarnation as an industrial school that was fit for teaching its students skills for the locale is justified."}
{"text":"He encountered difficulties in setting up the school, which he opened on July 4, 1881, and this included some opposition from white people who questioned the value of educating African Americans: \"These people feared the result of education would be that the Negros would leave the farms, and that it would be difficult to secure them for domestic service.\""}
{"text":"He describes how he has depended on the advice of two men in particular and these were the ones who wrote to General Armstrong asking for a teacher. One is a white man and a former slave holder called George W. Campbell. The other is a \"black\" man and a former slave called Lewis Adams."}
{"text":"When the school opened they had 30 students and these were divided roughly equally between the sexes. Many more had wanted to come, but it had been decided that they must be over 15 and have had some education already. Many who came were public school teachers and some were around 40 years of age. The number of pupils increased each week and there were nearly 50 by the end of the first month."}
{"text":"A co-teacher came at the end of the first six weeks. This was Olivia A. Davidson and she later became his wife. She had been taught in Ohio and came South as she had heard of the need for teachers. She is described as brave in the way she nursed the sick when others would not (such as caring for a boy with smallpox). She also trained further at Hampton and then at Massachusetts State Normal School at Framingham."}
{"text":"She and Washington agreed that the students needed more than a 'book education' and they thought they must show them how to care for their bodies and how to earn a living after they had left the school. They tried to educate them in a way that would make them want to stay in these agricultural districts (rather than leave for the city and be forced to live by their wits). Many of the students came initially to study so that they would not have to work with their hands, whereas Washington aimed for them to be capable of all sorts of labor and to not be ashamed of it."}
{"text":"\"Anxious Days and Sleepless Nights\": This chapter starts by stating how the people spent Christmas drinking and having a merry time, and not bearing in mind the true essence of Christmas. This chapter also discusses the institute's relationship with the locals of Tuskegee, the purchase and cultivation of a new farm, the erection of a new building, and the introduction of several generous donors, mostly northern. The death of Washington's first wife, Fannie N. Smith, is announced in this chapter. He had a daughter named Portia."}
{"text":"\"A Harder Task Than Making Bricks Without Straw\": In this chapter, Washington discusses the importance of having the students erect their own buildings: \"Not a few times, when a new student has been led into the temptation of marring the looks of some building by lead pencil marks or by the cuts of a jack-knife, I have heard an old student remind him: 'Don't do that. That is our building. I helped put it up.'\" The bricks reference in the title refers to the difficulty of forming bricks without some very necessary tools: money and experience. Through much labour, the students were able to produce fine bricks; their confidence then spilled over into other efforts, such as the building of vehicles."}
{"text":"\"Raising Money\": Washington travels north to secure additional funding for the institute with which he had much success. Two years after a meeting with one man, the Institute received a cheque of $10,000 and, from another couple, a gift of $50,000. Washington felt great pressure for his school and students to succeed, for failure would reflect poorly on the ability of the race. It is this time period Washington begins working with Andrew Carnegie, proving to Carnegie that this school was worthy of support. Not only did Washington find large donations helpful, but small loans were key which paid the bills and gave evidence to the community's faith in this type of education."}
{"text":"\"Two Thousand Miles for a Five-Minute Speech\": Washington marries again. His new wife is Olivia A. Davidson, first mentioned in Chapter 8. This chapter begins Washington's public speaking career; first at the National Education Association. His next goal was to speak before a Southern white audience. His first opportunity was limited by prior engagements and travel time, leaving him only five minutes to give his speech. Subsequent speeches were filled with purpose: when in the North he would be actively seeking funds, when in the South encouraged \"the material and intellectual growth of both races.\" The result of one speech was the Atlanta Exposition Speech."}
{"text":"\"The Atlanta Exposition Address\": The speech that Washington gave to the Atlanta Exposition is printed here in its entirety. He also gives some explanation of the reaction to his speech: first, delight from all, then, slowly, a feeling among African Americans that Washington had not been strong enough in regards to the 'rights' of the race. In time, however, the African-American public would become, once again, generally pleased with Washington's goals and methods for African-American uplift."}
{"text":"\"The Secret Success in Public Speaking\": Washington speaks again of the reception of his Atlanta Exposition Speech. He then goes on to give the reader some advice about public speaking and describes several memorable speeches."}
{"text":"\"Last Words\": Washington describes his last interactions with General Armstrong and his first with Armstrong's successor, Rev. Dr. Hollis B. Frissell. The greatest surprise of his life was being invited to receive an honorary degree from Harvard University, the first awarded to an African American. Another great honor for Washington and Tuskegee was the visit of President William McKinley to the institute, an act which McKinley hoped to impress upon citizens his \"interest and faith in the race.\" Washington then describes the conditions at Tuskegee Institute and his resounding hope for the future of the race."}
{"text":"Lynching in the South at this time was prevalent as mobs of whites would take the law into their own hands and would torture and murder of dozens of men and women, including white men. The offenses of the victims included: \"for being victor over a white man in a fight;\" \"protecting fugitive from posse;\" \"stealing seventy-five cents;\" \"expressing sympathy for mob's victim;\" \"for being father of boy who jostled white women.\" It is clear that any white person to show sympathy or offer protection for African-American victims would be labeled complicit himself and become vulnerable to violence by the mob. In 1901, Reverend Quincy Ewing of Mississippi charged the press and pulpit with uniting public sentiment against lynching. Lynching would continue into the 1950s and 1960s."}
{"text":"Some blame Washington's comparatively sheepish message upon a lack of desire for true African-American uplift. Some, taking into account the environment in which he was delivering his message, support Washington for making any public stance at all."}
{"text":"The relationship between Washington and his critics."}
{"text":"In 1905, the Niagara Movement issued a statement enumerating their demands against oppression and for civil rights. The Movement established itself as an entity entirely removed from Washington in conciliation, but rather a new, more radical course of action: \"Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows, so long as America is unjust.\" For a time, the Movement grew very successfully, but they lost their effectiveness when chapters began to disagree with one another. Eventually, the Movement's efforts translated into the development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)."}
{"text":"Of course there were other participants in this discussion of the future of the African-American race, including that of W. H. Thomas, another African-American man. Thomas believed that African Americans were \"deplorably bad\" and that it would require a \"miracle\" to make any sort of progress. As in the case of Washington and DuBois, Washington and Thomas have areas of agreement, though DuBois would not so agree: that the best chance for an African American was in the areas of farming and country life. In some respects, it is hard to compare the two as each has different intentions."}
{"text":"Similarly, Thomas Dixon, author of \"The Clansman\" (1905), began a newspaper controversy with Washington over the industrial system, most likely to encourage talk of his upcoming book. He characterized the newfound independence of Tuskegee graduates as inciting competition: \"Competition is war\u2026. What will the [southern white man] do when put to the test? He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread\u2014kill him!\""}
{"text":"In September 2011, a seven-part documentary television and DVD series was produced by LionHeart FilmWorks and director Kevin Hershberger using the title \"Up From Slavery\". The 315-minute series is distributed by Mill Creek Entertainment. This series is not directly about the Booker T. Washington autobiography \"Up From Slavery\", but tells the story of Black Slavery in America from the first arrival of African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 to the Civil War and the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which prohibits the government from denying a citizen the vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (i.e., slavery), the third of the Reconstruction Amendments which finally ended the legitimacy of slavery in the United States."}
{"text":"The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965, the result of a collaboration between human rights activist Malcolm\u00a0X and journalist Alex Haley. Haley coauthored the autobiography based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and Malcolm\u00a0X's 1965 assassination. The \"Autobiography\" is a spiritual conversion narrative that outlines Malcolm\u00a0X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. After the leader was killed, Haley wrote the book's epilogue. He described their collaborative process and the events at the end of Malcolm\u00a0X's life."}
{"text":"While Malcolm\u00a0X and scholars contemporary to the book's publication regarded Haley as the book's ghostwriter, modern scholars tend to regard him as an essential collaborator who intentionally muted his authorial voice to create the effect of Malcolm\u00a0X speaking directly to readers. Haley influenced some of Malcolm\u00a0X's literary choices. For example, Malcolm\u00a0X left the Nation of Islam during the period when he was working on the book with Haley. Rather than rewriting earlier chapters as a polemic against the Nation which Malcolm X had rejected, Haley persuaded him to favor a style of \"suspense and drama\". According to Manning Marable, \"Haley was particularly worried about what he viewed as Malcolm\u00a0X's anti-Semitism\" and he rewrote material to eliminate it."}
{"text":"When the \"Autobiography\" was published, \"The New York Times\" reviewer described it as a \"brilliant, painful, important book\". In 1967, historian John William Ward wrote that it would become a classic American autobiography. In 1998, \"Time\" named \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" as one of ten \"required reading\" nonfiction books. James Baldwin and Arnold Perl adapted the book as a film; their screenplay provided the source material for Spike Lee's 1992 film \"Malcolm\u00a0X\"."}
{"text":"Haley coauthored \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\", and also performed the basic functions of a ghostwriter and biographical amanuensis, writing, compiling, and editing the \"Autobiography\" based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm\u00a0X between 1963 and his subject's 1965 assassination. The two first met in 1959, when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for \"Reader's Digest\", and again when Haley interviewed Malcolm\u00a0X for \"Playboy\" in 1962."}
{"text":"In 1963 the Doubleday publishing company asked Haley to write a book about the life of Malcolm\u00a0X. American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom writes, \"When Haley approached Malcolm with the idea, Malcolm gave him a startled look ...\" Haley recalls, \"It was one of the few times I have ever seen him uncertain.\" After Malcolm\u00a0X was granted permission from Elijah Muhammad, he and Haley commenced work on the \"Autobiography\", a process which began as two-and three-hour interview sessions at Haley's studio in Greenwich Village. Bloom writes, \"Malcolm was critical of Haley's middle-class status, as well as his Christian beliefs and twenty years of service in the U.S. Military.\""}
{"text":"When work on the \"Autobiography\" began in early 1963, Haley grew frustrated with Malcolm\u00a0X's tendency to speak only about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Haley reminded him that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm\u00a0X, not Muhammad or the Nation of Islam, a comment which angered Malcolm\u00a0X. Haley eventually shifted the focus of the interviews toward the life of his subject when he asked Malcolm\u00a0X about his mother:"}
{"text":"I said, 'Mr. Malcolm, could you tell me something about your mother?' And I will never, ever forget how he stopped almost as if he was suspended like a marionette. And he said, 'I remember the kind of dresses she used to wear. They were old and faded and gray.' And then he walked some more. And he said, 'I remember how she was always bent over the stove, trying to stretch what little we had.' And that was the beginning, that night, of his walk. And he walked that floor until just about daybreak."}
{"text":"Though Haley is ostensibly a ghostwriter on the \"Autobiography\", modern scholars tend to treat him as an essential and core collaborator who acted as an invisible figure in the composition of the work. He minimized his own voice, and signed a contract to limit his authorial discretion in favor of producing what looked like verbatim copy. Manning Marable considers the view of Haley as simply a ghostwriter as a deliberate narrative construction of black scholars of the day who wanted to see the book as a singular creation of a dynamic leader and martyr. Marable argues that a critical analysis of the \"Autobiography\", or the full relationship between Malcolm\u00a0X and Haley, does not support this view; he describes it instead as a collaboration."}
{"text":"Haley's contribution to the work is notable, and several scholars discuss how it should be characterized. In a view shared by Eakin, Stone and Dyson, psychobiographical writer Eugene Victor Wolfenstein writes that Haley performed the duties of a quasi-psychoanalytic Freudian psychiatrist and spiritual confessor. Gillespie suggests, and Wolfenstein agrees, that the act of self-narration was itself a transformative process that spurred significant introspection and personal change in the life of its subject."}
{"text":"In \"Malcolm\u00a0X: The Art of Autobiography\", writer and professor John Edgar Wideman examines in detail the narrative landscapes found in biography. Wideman suggests that as a writer, Haley was attempting to satisfy \"multiple allegiances\": to his subject, to his publisher, to his \"editor's agenda\", and to himself. Haley was an important contributor to the \"Autobiography\"s popular appeal, writes Wideman. Wideman expounds upon the \"inevitable compromise\" of biographers, and argues that in order to allow readers to insert themselves into the broader socio-psychological narrative, neither coauthor's voice is as strong as it could have been. Wideman details some of the specific pitfalls Haley encountered while coauthoring the \"Autobiography\":"}
{"text":"You are serving many masters, and inevitably you are compromised. The man speaks and you listen but you do not take notes, the first compromise and perhaps betrayal. You may attempt through various stylistic conventions and devices to reconstitute for the reader your experience of hearing face to face the man's words. The sound of the man's narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts\u2014quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech\u2014vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes\u00a0..."}
{"text":"In \"Two Create One: The Act of Collaboration in Recent Black Autobiography: Ossie Guffy, Nate Shaw, and Malcolm\u00a0X\", Stone argues that Haley played an \"essential role\" in \"recovering the historical identity\" of Malcolm\u00a0X. Stone also reminds the reader that collaboration is a cooperative endeavor, requiring more than Haley's prose alone can provide, \"convincing and coherent\" as it may be:"}
{"text":"Though a writer's skill and imagination have combined words and voice into a more or less convincing and coherent narrative, the actual writer [Haley] has no large fund of memories to draw upon: the subject's [Malcolm\u00a0X] memory and imagination are the original sources of the arranged story and have also come into play critically as the text takes final shape. Thus \"where\" material comes from, and \"what\" has been done to it are separable and of equal significance in collaborations."}
{"text":"In Stone's estimation, supported by Wideman, the source of autobiographical material and the efforts made to shape them into a workable narrative are distinct, and of equal value in a critical assessment of the collaboration that produced the \"Autobiography\". While Haley's skills as writer have significant influence on the narrative's shape, Stone writes, they require a \"subject possessed of a powerful memory and imagination\" to produce a workable narrative."}
{"text":"While Marable argues that Malcolm\u00a0X was his own best revisionist, he also points out that Haley's collaborative role in shaping the \"Autobiography\" was notable. Haley influenced the narrative's direction and tone while remaining faithful to his subject's syntax and diction. Marable writes that Haley worked \"hundreds of sentences into paragraphs\", and organized them into \"subject areas\". Author William L. Andrews writes:"}
{"text":"[T]he narrative evolved out of Haley's interviews with Malcolm, but Malcolm had read Haley's typescript, and had made interlineated notes and often stipulated substantive changes, at least in the earlier parts of the text. As the work progressed, however, according to Haley, Malcolm yielded more and more to the authority of his ghostwriter, partly because Haley never let Malcolm read the manuscript unless he was present to defend it, partly because in his last months Malcolm had less and less opportunity to reflect on the text of his life because he was so busy living it, and partly because Malcolm had eventually resigned himself to letting Haley's ideas about effective storytelling take precedence over his own desire to denounce straightaway those whom he had once revered."}
{"text":"Andrews suggests that Haley's role expanded because the book's subject became less available to micro-manage the manuscript, and \"Malcolm had eventually resigned himself\" to allowing \"Haley's ideas about effective storytelling\" to shape the narrative."}
{"text":"Marable studied the \"Autobiography\" manuscript \"raw materials\" archived by Haley's biographer, Anne Romaine, and described a critical element of the collaboration, Haley's writing tactic to capture the voice of his subject accurately, a disjoint system of data mining that included notes on scrap paper, in-depth interviews, and long \"free style\" discussions. Marable writes, \"Malcolm also had a habit of scribbling notes to himself as he spoke.\" Haley would secretly \"pocket these sketchy notes\" and reassemble them in a sub rosa attempt to integrate Malcolm X's \"subconscious reflections\" into the \"workable narrative\". This is an example of Haley asserting authorial agency during the writing of the \"Autobiography\", indicating that their relationship was fraught with minor power struggles. Wideman and Rampersad agree with Marable's description of Haley's book-writing process."}
{"text":"The timing of the collaboration meant that Haley occupied an advantageous position to document the multiple conversion experiences of Malcolm\u00a0X and his challenge was to form them, however incongruent, into a cohesive workable narrative. Dyson suggests that \"profound personal, intellectual, and ideological changes ... led him to order events of his life to support a mythology of metamorphosis and transformation\". Marable addresses the confounding factors of the publisher and Haley's authorial influence, passages that support the argument that while Malcolm\u00a0X may have considered Haley a ghostwriter, he acted in actuality as a coauthor, at times without Malcolm\u00a0X's direct knowledge or expressed consent:"}
{"text":"Marable says the resulting text was stylistically and ideologically distinct from what Marable believes Malcolm\u00a0X would have written without Haley's influence, and it also differs from what may have actually been said in the interviews between Haley and Malcolm\u00a0X."}
{"text":"[T]he autobiography iconizes Malcolm twice, not once. Its second Malcolm\u2014the El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz finale\u2014is a mask with no distinct ideology, it is not particularly Islamic, not particularly nationalist, not particularly humanist. Like any well crafted icon or story, the mask is evidence of its subject's humanity, of Malcolm's strong human spirit. But both masks hide as much character as they show. The first mask served a nationalism Malcolm had rejected before the book was finished; the second is mostly empty and available."}
{"text":"Haley writes that during the last months of Malcolm\u00a0X's life \"uncertainty and confusion\" about his views were widespread in Harlem, his base of operations. In an interview four days before his death Malcolm\u00a0X said, \"I'm man enough to tell you that I can't put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now, but I'm flexible.\" Malcolm\u00a0X had not yet formulated a cohesive Black ideology at the time of his assassination and, Dyson writes, was \"experiencing a radical shift\" in his core \"personal and political understandings\"."}
{"text":"\"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" has influenced generations of readers. In 1990, Charles Solomon writes in the \"Los Angeles Times\", \"Unlike many '60s icons, \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\", with its double message of anger and love, remains an inspiring document.\" Cultural historian Howard Bruce Franklin describes it as \"one of the most influential books in late-twentieth-century American culture\", and the \"Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature\" credits Haley with shaping \"what has undoubtedly become the most influential twentieth-century African American autobiography\"."}
{"text":"Considering the literary impact of Malcolm X's \"Autobiography\", we may note the tremendous influence of the book, as well as its subject generally, on the development of the Black Arts Movement. Indeed, it was the day after Malcolm's assassination that the poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka, established the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which would serve to catalyze the aesthetic progression of the movement. Writers and thinkers associated with the Black Arts movement found in the \"Autobiography\" an aesthetic embodiment of his profoundly influential qualities, namely, \"the vibrancy of his public voice, the clarity of his analyses of oppression's hidden history and inner logic, the fearlessness of his opposition to white supremacy, and the unconstrained ardor of his advocacy for revolution 'by any means necessary.'\""}
{"text":"bell hooks writes \"When I was a young college student in the early seventies, the book I read which revolutionized my thinking about race and politics was \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\".\" David Bradley adds:"}
{"text":"She [hooks] is not alone. Ask any middle-aged socially conscious intellectual to list the books that influenced his or her youthful thinking, and he or she will most likely mention \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\". Some will do more than mention it. Some will say that ... they picked it up\u2014by accident, or maybe by assignment, or because a friend pressed it on them\u2014and that they approached the reading of it without great expectations, but somehow that book ... took hold of them. Got \"inside\" them. Altered their vision, their outlook, their insight. Changed their lives."}
{"text":"Max Elbaum concurs, writing that \"\"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" was without question the single most widely read and influential book among young people of all racial backgrounds who went to their first demonstration sometime between 1965 and 1968.\""}
{"text":"At the end of his tenure as the first African-American U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder selected \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" when asked what book he would recommend to a young person coming to Washington, D.C."}
{"text":"Doubleday had contracted to publish \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" and paid a $30,000 advance to Malcolm\u00a0X and Haley in 1963. In March 1965, three weeks after Malcolm\u00a0X's assassination, Nelson Doubleday, Jr., canceled its contract out of fear for the safety of his employees. Grove Press then published the book later that year. Since \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" has sold millions of copies, Marable described Doubleday's choice as the \"most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history\"."}
{"text":"\"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\" has sold well since its 1965 publication. According to \"The New York Times\", the paperback edition sold 400,000 copies in 1967 and 800,000 copies the following year. The \"Autobiography\" entered its 18th printing by 1970. \"The New York Times\" reported that six million copies of the book had been sold by 1977. The book experienced increased readership and returned to the best-seller list in the 1990s, helped in part by the publicity surrounding Spike Lee's 1992 film \"Malcolm\u00a0X\". Between 1989 and 1992, sales of the book increased by 300%."}
{"text":"In 1968 film producer Marvin Worth hired novelist James Baldwin to write a screenplay based on \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\"; Baldwin was joined by screenwriter Arnold Perl, who died in 1971 before the screenplay could be finished. Baldwin developed his work on the screenplay into the book \"One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley's \"The Autobiography of Malcolm\u00a0X\"\", published in 1972. Other authors who attempted to draft screenplays include playwright David Mamet, novelist David Bradley, author Charles Fuller, and screenwriter Calder Willingham. Director Spike Lee revised the Baldwin-Perl script for his 1992 film \"Malcolm X\"."}
{"text":"In July 2018, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture acquired one of the \"missing chapters\", \"The Negro\", at auction for $7,000."}
{"text":"The book has been published in more than 45 editions and in many languages, including Arabic, German, French, Indonesian. Important editions include:"}
{"text":"The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption is a 2012 autobiography of Rodney King (1965\u20132012). Known by a videotape as a victim of Los Angeles Police Department brutality, he became a civil rights icon. The book is co-authored by Lawrence J. Spagnola, an award-winning writer."}
{"text":"King reflects his reluctance as a civil rights icon, after a federal trial in which two of the officers were convicted. The city of LA made a settlement with him, paying damages. He felt as if he attracted opportunists and was used by some. He continued to battle addiction and other issues. The book finally wraps up with his obtaining sobriety and discussing lessons he has learned."}
{"text":"\"The Riot Within\" received mostly positive reviews by both the independent and mainstream media."}
{"text":"\"The Riot Within\" was classified by Amazon as a \"Criminal Biography\" and was listed next to books about serial killers, mob bosses and hackers. Amazon has refused to comment on why a memoir about a police brutality victim would be listed as such. The book was eventually re-classified under \"Memoir and Historical\"."}
{"text":"Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (1994) is an autobiographical and debut book by Nathan McCall."}
{"text":"In an April 2014 interview with \"Ebony\" magazine, Nathan McCall stated that he was amazed that \"Makes Me Wanna Holler\" was still selling 20 years after it was originally published."}
{"text":"Finding Fish is a 2001 autobiographical book by Antwone Fisher."}
{"text":"Antwone Fisher was born in prison to an incarcerated mother and a father who had been shot by a girlfriend. After being placed in foster care, Fisher was treated brutally and blamed for his own misfortunes. He was also sexually abused by a woman who often babysat him from around age 3 to 8. He then was sent to George Junior Republic. Eventually, he found his way into a stable job in the Navy."}
{"text":"Later, Fisher became a security guard at Sony Pictures Studios, where his story inspired producer Todd Black to make a film, \"Antwone Fisher\", based on his story."}
{"text":"Die Nigger Die! is a 1969 political autobiography by the American political activist H. Rap Brown (now known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin). The book was first released in the United States in 1969 (by Dial Press) and then in the United Kingdom in 1970 (by Allison & Busby). Brown describes his experiences as a young black civil rights activist, and how they shaped his opinions of white America."}
{"text":"He expresses his opinions on what he believes black Americans need to do to break free from white oppression. As a chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and from 1968 a member of the Black Panther Party, he was heavily involved with organizations that espoused a Black Power ideology."}
{"text":"After Brown's conviction for murder in March 2002, the book was reprinted by Lawrence Hill Press, with a foreword by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell."}
{"text":"How We Fight for Our Lives is a coming-of-age memoir written by American author Saeed Jones and published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. The story follows Jones as a young, black, gay man in 1990s Lewisville, Texas as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears."}
{"text":"\"How We Fight for Our Lives\" has earned widespread critical acclaim. It received starred reviews from \"Publishers Weekly\", \"Library Journal\" and \"Kirkus Reviews\". NPR called the book an \"Extremely personal, emotionally gritty, and unabashedly honest...outstanding memoir.\" The Los Angeles Review of Books noted that \"Jones displays a poet\u2019s knack for the searing detail, and the pages of his memoir are full of beautiful and surprising images that buoy us through the pain and heartache and often seething rage that fuel its propulsive, precise narration.\""}
{"text":"In 2019 the book won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction; in 2020 it won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir\/Biography, the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award and the Randy Shilts Award for gay nonfiction. It was listed in \"Kirkus Reviews\" Best Books of 2019 in the Best Memoirs section and on \"Time's\" list of must-read books of 2019\"."}
{"text":"Pryor Convictions: And Other Life Sentences is an autobiography by the American comedian Richard Pryor. The book was published in 1995. Included are details of Pryor's rough childhood growing up in his mother's brothel, his drug problems, his seven marriages, his self-immolation, his life dealing with multiple sclerosis, and his stand-up career."}
{"text":"There Will Be No Miracles Here is a 2018 memoir by Casey Gerald."}
{"text":"A Promised Land is a memoir by Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Published on November 17, 2020, by Crown Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, in the United States and Viking, owned by Penguin Random House, in the United Kingdom, it is the first of a planned two-volume series. Remaining focused on his political career, the presidential memoir documents Obama's life from his early years through the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011."}
{"text":"The book has received many reviews and was put on end-of-year best of lists by \"The New York Times\", \"The Washington Post\", and \"The Guardian\". Commercially, it has been extremely successful and, as of the January 24, 2021 issue, the book has been the \"New York Times\" best-seller in non-fiction for eight consecutive weeks. The book was highly anticipated and, two months before its release, \"The New York Times\" remarked that it was \"virtually guaranteed\" to be the year's top seller, despite its mid-November release date. The book is 768 pages long and available in digital, paperback, and hardcover formats and has been translated into two dozen languages. There is also a 28 hour audiobook edition that is read by Obama himself."}
{"text":"Obama said in a tweet following the announcement of the publication of the book that he has aimed to \"provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody\"."}
{"text":"The memoir, remaining focused on Obama's political life, begins with his early life, details his first campaigns, and stretches through most of his first term as President. The book concludes with the events surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, ending with a meeting between Obama and the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid. While the book remains focused on politics, the first 200 pages of the book, approximately, are devoted to Obama's life and career up through his time in Chicago."}
{"text":"Obama, when describing his days attending college in the 1980s, admitted that he would read Karl Marx, Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse in order to impress potential love interests. Obama reminisced that \"it\u2019s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know\". Obama evaluated his college reading that \"As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless\"."}
{"text":"Obama gives favorable descriptions to many of the staffers and other politicians that he encounters throughout his early life and presidency. In her review for the New York Times, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that Obama's \"affection for his first-term inner circle\" was \"moving\" and that in his descriptions of others, he \"makes heroes of people\". The memoir praises Claire McCaskill for \"voting her conscience\" on the Dream Act, Tim Geithner for his handling of the 2008 financial crisis, and many others."}
{"text":"Obama is also critical in his description of some other world leaders, such as by writing that the Vladimir Putin's \"satirical image of masculine vigor\" is the result of \"the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram.\" British Prime Minister David Cameron is described by Obama as someone with \u201cthe easy confidence of someone who\u2019d never been pressed too hard by life\u201d."}
{"text":"Some reviewers commented on Obama's reaction to winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, writing in the book that his simple response was \"for what?\". Obama elaborated when arriving in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony: \"The idea that I, or any one person, could bring order to such chaos seemed laughable... On some level, the crowds below were cheering an illusion.\" Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Eli Stokols, in their respective reviews, described the reaction as \"incredulous\". Obama also recalled telling the First Lady the news after an early morning phone call and receiving the reply \"that's wonderful honey\", before she went back to sleep. In analyzing the response, Adichie noted that Obama \"considers his public image overinflated; he pushes pins into his own hype balloons.\""}
{"text":"Obama notes in the book, \"In the middle of the Cold War, the chances of reaching any consensus had been slim, which is why the U.N. had stood idle as Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary or U.S. planes dropped napalm on the Vietnamese countryside. Even after the Cold War, divisions within the Security Council continued to hamstring the U.N.'s ability to tackle problems. Its member states lacked either the means or the collective will to reconstruct failing states like Somalia, or prevent ethnic slaughter in places like Sri Lanka.\""}
{"text":"According to book review aggregator website Book Marks, \"A Promised Land\" received favorable reviews. From the 33 reviews collected, 12 were classified as \"rave\", 16 as \"positive\" and 5 as \"mixed\"."}
{"text":"Among magazine reviews, Laura Miller, in \"Slate Magazine\", wrote that the book \"is a pleasure to read for the intelligence, equanimity, and warmth of its author\u2014from his unfeigned delight in his fabulously wholesome family to his manifest fondness for the people who worked for and with him, especially early on\". \"Time\" published a review that stated \"Obama knows how to tell a good story\" and that \"[h]is insight into his mindset during his biggest presidential moments is a reminder of his thoughtfulness\". The review continued by stating that \"from cover to cover, A Promised Land is a reminder of the narrative that Obama has spent his career enunciating\". Other reviews were published in \"The Wall Street Journal\", \"The Financial Times\", \"Entertainment Weekly\", \"Esquire\", and \"Oprah Magazine\"."}
{"text":"In a review in \"The Guardian\", Gary Younge wrote: \"As a work of political literature A Promised Land is impressive\" and that \"Obama is a gifted writer\". In a second review published by \"The Guardian\", Julian Borger describes the book as \"701 pages of elegantly written narrative, contemplation and introspection, in which he frequently burrows down into his own motivations\" and that it \"delivers amply on the basic expectations of political autobiographies, providing a granular view from the driving seat of power.\" In a third review in \"The Guardian\", Peter Conrad wrote: \"Like the best autobiographers, Barack Obama writes about himself in the hope of discovering who or even what he is.\""}
{"text":"In her \"Slate Magazine\" article on November 20, 2020, Laura Miller summarized the book's initial reviews by stating it is \"admirable but, depending on their viewpoints, insufficiently intimate, lacking racial indignation, or just a bit glum.\" Miller also noted that many of the book's critics complained about the book's length, and that despite its length, it is the first of multiple volumes. Miller notes that the book has a tendency to provide \"what some consider an excess of background information\" when describing situations and protocols. The review goes on to note that many of the explanations can seem \"remedial\" for \"a practiced observer of the executive branch\", that Miller acknowledges is \"often the sort of person who gets asked to weigh in on such a book\"."}
{"text":"Philip Terzian wrote in \"The Wall Street Journal\" that \"[a]s a matter of substance\", the book \"tells us little that a newspaper reader wouldn't already know\" and that it \"can get monotonous at times\", going on to write that the \"chapters unfold in a formulaic, curiously uniform, fashion\". In another review, Edward Luce wrote in \"The Financial Times\" that the book's main \"deficiency\" is that Obama \"is too reasonable, almost to the point of detachment.\""}
{"text":"Tshilidzi Marwala in \"Cape Argus\", \"The Star\" (South Africa) and voices 360 wrote that Obama like light has a dual nature, one the phenomenon and another the politician. Obama the politician achieved many things under hostile environment while Obama the phenomenon was inspirational and won the Nobel prize for no other reason than the fact that he was a phenomenon. He concluded that Obama the politician triumphed over Obama the phenomenon."}
{"text":"Among other acclamations, the book won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Memoir and Autobiography. It was named one of \"The 10 Best Books of 2020\" by \"The New York Times Book Review\", one of \"50 notable works of nonfiction in 2020\" by \"The Washington Post\", one of the \"Best politics books of 2020\" by \"The Guardian\", and one of the \"Best Political Books of 2020\" by \"Marie Claire\"."}
{"text":"The book was released on November 17, 2020, soon after the national elections, in hardcover, digital and audiobook formats. The bestselling memoir was published by Crown Publishing Group in the United States and Canada while Viking Press served as publisher in other English speaking countries. Penguin, the parent company of both Viking and Crown, has also translated the book into over twenty languages."}
{"text":"In English, the book has been released in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and audio versions. The book was published by Crown Publishing Group in the United States and Canada and by Viking Press in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. The unabridged audiobook version of the book, which runs for 28 hours and 10 minutes and is read by Obama himself, is also available on Audible. It is the third presidential memoir read by its author, following \"White House Diary\" by Jimmy Carter and \"Decision Points\" by George W. Bush."}
{"text":"Alongside the English original, Penguin Random House announced in September 2020 that 24 translations will be published: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese."}
{"text":"Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays by James Baldwin, published in 1955, mostly tackling issues of race in America and Europe. The volume, as his first non-fiction book, compiles essays of Baldwin that had previously appeared in such magazines as \"Harper's Magazine\", \"Partisan Review\", and \"The New Leader\"."}
{"text":"\"Notes of a Native Son\" is widely regarded as a classic of the black autobiographical genre. The Modern Library placed it at number 19 on its list of the 100 best 20th-century nonfiction books."}
{"text":"In spite of his father wanting him to be a preacher, Baldwin says he had always been a writer at heart. He tried to find his path as a black writer; although he was not European, American culture is informed by that culture too\u2014moreover he had to grapple with other black writers. Furthermore, Baldwin emphasizes the importance of his desire to be a good man and writer."}
{"text":"Baldwin castigates Harriet Beecher Stowe's \"Uncle Tom's Cabin\" for being too sentimental, and for depicting black slaves as praying to a white God so as to be cleansed and whitened. He proceeds to repudiate Richard Wright's \"Native Son\" for portraying Bigger Thomas as an angry black man, viewing this as an example of stigmatizing categorization."}
{"text":"Baldwin offers a sharp critique of Richard Wright's \"Native Son\", citing its main character, Bigger Thomas, as unrealistic, unsympathetic and stereotypical."}
{"text":"\"Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough\"."}
{"text":"Baldwin criticises \"Carmen Jones\", a film adaptation of \"Carmen\" using an all-black cast. Baldwin is unhappy that the characters display no connection to the condition of blacks and sees it as no coincidence that the main characters have lighter complexions."}
{"text":"Baldwin points out that the rent is very expensive in Harlem. Moreover, although there are black politicians, the President is white. On to the black press, Baldwin notes that it emulates the white press, with its scandalous spreads and so forth. However the black Church seems to him to be a unique forum for the spelling out of black injustice. Finally, he ponders on antisemitism amongst blacks and comes to the conclusion that the frustration boils down to Jews being white and more powerful than Negroes."}
{"text":"Baldwin tells the story that happened to The Melodeers, a group of jazz singers (including two of Baldwin's brothers) employed by the Progressive Party to sing in Southern Churches. However, once in Atlanta, Georgia, they were used for canvassing until they refused to sing at all and were returned to their hometown. They now enjoy success in New York City."}
{"text":"The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, is the autobiography and memoir of James McBride first published in 1995; it is also a tribute to his mother, whom he calls Mommy, or Ma. The chapters alternate between James McBride's descriptions of his early life and first-person accounts of his mother Ruth's life, mostly taking place before her son was born. McBride depicts the conflicting emotions that he endured as he struggled to discover who he truly was, as his mother narrates the hardships that she had to overcome as a white, Jewish woman who chose to marry a black man in 1942."}
{"text":"In \"The Color of Water\" author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride. Ruth married Andrew Dennis McBride, a black man from North Carolina. James's childhood was spent in a chaotic household of twelve children who had neither the time nor the outlet to ponder questions of race and identity. Ruth did not want to discuss the painful details of her early family life when her abusive father, Tateh, lorded over her sweet-tempered and meek mother, Mameh (\"tateh\" and \"mameh\" are Yiddish terms of endearment for \"father\" and \"mother,\" roughly equivalent to \"daddy and \"mommy\"). Ruth had cut all ties with her Jewish family, as they had essentially disowned her when she married James's father."}
{"text":"James weaves his own life story into his mother's story. Ruth's philosophies on race, religion, and work influence him greatly. Ruth always sent her children to the best schools, no matter the commute, to ensure they received the finest possible educations. She demanded respect and hard work from her children, and always treated them tenderly. She had an unwavering faith in God and strong moral convictions. To Ruth, issues of race and identity took secondary importance to moral beliefs."}
{"text":"Ruth died at her home in Ewing, New Jersey, on January 9, 2010."}
{"text":"James spoke of the Civil Rights Movement which foreshadowed his decision to lean towards the African-American side of his bi-racial identity. Many of his older siblings had also chosen to only acknowledge that they were African-American."}
{"text":"This symbolized her constant need for movement in order to deal with her stress and depression and escapism."}
{"text":"When Ruth's mother sang the song \"Birdie, Birdie, Fly Away\", she was referring to Ruth as the bird, able to move so swiftly and easily, while she referred to herself as the handicapped bird who deserved to be sacrificed and killed. This foreshadowed her death."}
{"text":"The trade paper edition, published in February, 1998, was on the \"New York Times\" bestseller list for over 100 weeks (2 years), won the 1997 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Literary Excellence, was an ALA Notable Book of the Year, The New York Women's Agenda's first book for \"New York City Reads Together\" and has sold more than 1.5 million copies. It has been published in 16 languages and in more than 20 countries."}
{"text":"Down These Mean Streets is a memoir by Piri Thomas, a Latino of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in Spanish Harlem, a section of Harlem with a large Puerto Rican population. The book follows Piri through the first few decades of his life, lives in poverty, joins and fights with street gangs, faces racism (in both New York City and elsewhere), travels, succumbs to heroin addiction, gets involved in crime, is imprisoned, and is finally released."}
{"text":"One of the major themes of \"Down These Mean Streets\" centers on Piri Thomas's identity as a dark-complexioned Puerto Rican. Although he is of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage, he is seen as black rather than Hispanic or Latino. His own family rejects the African aspect of their Latino-Caribbean ancestry, causing Piri to spend much of his youth and early adult life contemplating his racial and ethnic identity."}
{"text":"The book was originally published in 1967. A special Thirtieth Anniversary Edition in 1997 included a new afterword from the author. A sequel, \"7 Long Times\", gives more depth to his prison years."}
{"text":"The book opens with a \"Prologue\" in which Thomas articulates the reason he has written this memoir: \u201cI wanna tell ya I\u2019m here \u2014 you bunch of mother-jumpers \u2014 I\u2019m here, and I want recognition, whatever that mudder-fuckin word means.\u201d Piri introduces himself as a \u201cskinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can\u201d who is \u201cunsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching.\u201d The Prologue also introduces a note of loneliness, bitterness, and hatred that will continue through the book."}
{"text":"The story proper begins in Harlem where Piri is living with his family. The year is 1941, at the tail end of the Depression, and Thomas's father has a job with the Works Progress Administration, while his mother stays at home with the children, often telling them stories of her homeland, Puerto Rico. After the death of Piri\u2019s baby brother Ricardo, the family moves from Spanish Harlem to the Italian section on 114th Street to leave all the bad memories behind. Piri has various encounters with the local kids in the street, and despite various fights, Piri earns the Italians' respect by not ratting on them."}
{"text":"Piri and his family move to the Long Island suburbs. Piri is apprehensive because he has heard bad things about the area, but upon arriving, Piri seems to do quite well in his new neighbourhood. He plays baseball with classmates and attends a school dance where he flirts with a girl named Marcia; however, Piri is shocked to later hear a group of girls at the dance talking about his skin colour. This, along with Poppa seeing another woman, makes Piri very upset."}
{"text":"Three months later, Piri ends up leaving Long Island with the intention of starting anew back in Harlem. Here, however, he finds himself homeless. Desperate for cash, Piri searches for work and goes after a position as a sales representative. Still in Harlem, Piri introduces himself to the girl of his dreams, Trina (Carlito Diaz\u2019s sister), and calls her his \u201cMarine Tiger.\u201d Later on, Piri makes a new friend named Brew, who forces Piri to further question his own identity; Brew tries to convince Piri that if your skin is black, then you are a black man, no matter what your ethnicity is. Piri and Brew discuss heading South so that Piri can discover what it means to be a black man."}
{"text":"Brew shares with Piri the ABC lesson; this lesson is about how to forgive white men for things such as racism, and how to remain calm in uncomfortable situations because of their skin colour. Piri argues with his brother Jos\u00e9 because Jos\u00e9 does not understand why Piri wants to go South; in his view, Piri is Puerto Rican, not black. Piri becomes angry and upset that his own brother does not understand him, and this further intensifies his desire to head South. Poppa makes an effort to relate to and comfort Piri, but Piri still decides to leave, despite the objections from his family."}
{"text":"Piri and Brew check into a hotel in Norfolk, and later talk to a man at the \u2018National Maritime Union\u2019 building. The two of them share stories with this man regarding being singled out due to the colour of their skin; however, the man disagrees with Brew\u2019s opinions on identity and explains that every man is free to identify himself with the ethnicity that they choose."}
{"text":"Piri and Brew head out on the ship, on which Piri works as a waiter. When they arrive in Texas, Piri goes out with a man and they both want to hire sexual workers; Piri says he wants to hire a white woman. Through his various encounters down South, Piri realizes that every place he goes to, no matter what language you speak or where you come from, if you are black, then you are black."}
{"text":"Shortly after Piri heads back to New York, Momma dies and Piri becomes angry and resentful with Poppa upon remembering that he had another woman. Piri goes back to living on the roofs, streets and apartments of friends in Harlem; he also gets back into drugs and begins to sell everything he can to have money for heroin. Luckily, Waneko and his mother eventually help Piri with the drug detoxification process. To distract him from drugs, Piri participates in robberies with Danny, Billy and Loui; with each and every robbery, Piri becomes less and less concerned with the consequences of his actions and all the people he affects and hurts."}
{"text":"While Trina is in Puerto Rico, Piri impregnates a different Puerto Rican woman, Dulcien. Piri takes responsibility and buys tickets for Dulcien to go back to New York with the baby. Piri also convinces Louie to get into business again; they, along with Billy and Danny, carry out a robbery in bar\/discotheque in downtown New York. However, the robbery doesn't go according to plan; Piri is shot in the chest, and upon trying to escape back to Harlem, he shoots the police officer who shot him. Piri is then arrested and taken to a hospital."}
{"text":"Piri wakes up in the hospital, is questioned by police and is transferred to prison to await trial; he is sentenced to no more than 5-15 years for armed robbery, which he will serves at Sing Sing and then Comstock State Prison. In prison, he studies masonry, works in construction, gets his high school diploma as well as other educational certificates. Above all, Piri describes his encounters he has with other inmates. Among the most significant encounters are with a Nation of Islam study group. Piri also begins to read a lot and becomes interested in psychology, and fascinated by the meaning of God and understanding."}
{"text":"Piri\u2019s family visits him together for the first time in three years; they share with Piri the news that Trina has gotten married. At the end of nearly four years in prison, Piri is finally eligible for parole; however, he is told that he will have to wait another two years because his case is very serious.As his second appearance before the parole board approaches, he tries to remain calm and collected; he even stops himself from fighting another inmate. Piri is later told by the parole board that he will in fact be going home."}
{"text":"Momma Piri\u2019s mother was born in Puerto Rico, and is still closely attached to her homeland. She has fair skin, unlike her husband and Piri. Piri and his mother have a close, solid relationship; they support and understand each other. She sees that Piri is struggling at school and getting into fights, but she doesn\u2019t punish him for his actions. In fact, she lets Piri do what he wants, despite differences in opinion. The two of them have a special kind of love; one that Piri respects and cherishes. When Piri heads South with Brew, he learns that his mother is sick and in the hospital; when Piri returns to see her, she is in very critical condition and later dies."}
{"text":"Another perspective that this memoir permits to analyze in terms of race and gender, is how characters continually struggle against racial oppression at expense of women and queer subjects. The struggle in search of recognition makes not only Piri but also characters like his father, and Brew, to neglect women and impose chauvinistic attitudes that only hinders more women and queer folks into the hierarchical structure of the United States."}
{"text":"On the other hand, Brew, who is a dark-skinned African American from Harlem, represents more the vision of \u201can angry black nationalists of the 1960s.\u201d Brew believes that if you look like a negro, then you are one, and that there is no way you can escape this destiny. For Brew, the color of your skin is what determines your race. Piri is at the limbo, he is confused about his identity. But, while the social system (and his friend Brew) continually blackens him, he admits to feeling identified as a Puerto Rican."}
{"text":"Another interpretation of Piri\u2019s decision to go to the South, sustains that Piri does so in order to know \u201cwhat\u2019s shaking\u201d or what is happening down there. His trip to the South would have meant for Piri, an increase in his solidarity sentiment for Afro American people against white supremacy. This trip has also served him to reinforce his resistance toward the white and black binary that obliterates distinctive elements of his identity. So Piri\u2019s trip to the South can be seen as a continuous struggle for the self-recognition of his own blackness."}
{"text":"\"Down These Mean Streets\" is seen by many scholars to be a foundational work of the Nuyorican literary canon. Thomas has been described as \u201cthe best known of his generation of writers and is generally considered the chronicler of the barrio since he was the first to describe his experiences as a second-generation Puerto Rican in the United States.\u201d Indeed, Ilan Stavans notes that \"Down These Means Streets\" is \u201cnow considered a classic and has never been out of print.\u201d"}
{"text":"Critic Regina Bernard-Carre\u00f1o states that \u201cNuyorican biographies, novels and poetry, spoke directly to [the] misrepresentations of a people and their anti-colonial struggle. An important factor in Puerto Rican immigrant writing and the Nuyorican experience is the articulation of difference and anger [. . .]. Puerto Rican writing exposes anger towards Americanization and assimilation\u201d, just as Thomas does in his book. Bernard-Carre\u00f1o also asserts that \u201cNuyorican writing became the genre that included the dynamics of language (bilingualism), bicultural identity (the island vs. the mainland), and the sociopolitics contained therein. While all these dynamics inform Nuyorican writing, language is perhaps one of the critical constructors of the Nuyorican experience and identity\u2026Nuyorican identity became its own culture composed of bicultural and bilingual people.\u201d"}
{"text":"\"Down These Mean Streets\" has either been banned or challenged in Salinas, California; Teaneck, NJ; Darien, CT; District 25 in Queens, New York City, New York; and in Long Island, New York."}
{"text":"In an interview, Thomas acknowledges that \"Down These Mean Streets\" \u201cwas censored all over the place.\u201d Specifically, Thomas mentions Darien, Connecticut where a bond was issued unless the book was removed from town\u2019s shelves. Thomas continues, stating that the censorship was due to a worry that it \u201cwas going to poison the children\u2019s minds.\u201d While speaking at a college in Darien, Thomas said, \u201cListen, you can\u2019t keep your kids in a greenhouse. This is the reality of what\u2019s happening.\u201d"}
{"text":"Firefight at Yechon: Courage and Racism in the Korean War, is an autobiography by Charles M. Bussey."}
{"text":"Bussey joined the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black air unit, which protected Allied bombers on missions over Europe during World War II in over North Africa, Italy and finally Germany."}
{"text":"Bussey later served as an Army officer in the Korean war."}
{"text":"On July 20, 1950, Bussey was returning to his 77th Engineer Combat Company with mail from the states for one of his platoons, when he came across a dozen \"lollygagagging\" (resting) army truck drivers. Bussey heard fighting in the town ahead, in which Bassey states his company was supposed to provide back up support. He climbed a nearby hill. A kilometer to the rear of the vehicle column he spotted a large body of white-clad Koreans coming toward them."}
{"text":"Bussey ordered the drivers to unload the two machine guns and ammunition in their trucks and drag them to the top of the hill."}
{"text":"The enemy unit was destroyed. Bussey's group was given credit for killing 258 enemy soldiers in the battle. A day after United States forces occupied Yechon, an Associated Press reporter filed a story about the entire battle and said it was \"the first sizable ground victory in the Korean war\"."}
{"text":"Bussey stated that he was denied the Medal of Honor in the battle because a racist white officer, Lt. Col. John T. Corley, felt the nation's highest medal for valor should only be awarded to a black man posthumously."}
{"text":"Thirty nine years after the conflict, Bussey could not pinpoint the mass grave site of the dead North Korean soldiers and local civilians could not recall anything about the incident."}
{"text":"The Washington Post states that \"prejudiced Army historians later insisted, against the evidence...[the Battle of Yechon]...never really happened\"."}
{"text":"Moonwalk is a 1988 autobiography written by American recording artist Michael Jackson. The book was first published by Doubleday on February 1, 1988, five months after the release of Jackson's 1987 \"Bad\" album, and named after Jackson's signature dance move, the moonwalk. The book contains a foreword by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It reached number one on the \"New York Times Best Seller list\". The book was reissued by Doubleday on October 13, 2009 following Jackson's death on June 25, 2009."}
{"text":"Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was an editor at Doubleday, secured the book deal and paid Jackson a $300,000 advance. As part of the deal Jackson wanted Onassis to write a foreword, which she initially refused not wanting her name on any books she worked on but agreed to three paragraphs. She also edited the book."}
{"text":"The first manuscript of the book was written by Robert Hilburn and was refused by the publishers, Doubleday, because it lacked \"juicy details\". A second manuscript was written by Stephen Davis, which Jackson drastically edited. Jackson finally decided to write the book himself, with help from Shaye Areheart (although there were reports that Areheart later quit after Jackson threw a snake at her)."}
{"text":"Due to the public interest in Jackson, \"Moonwalk\" was prepared for publication in secret. Relatives of Doubleday employees were hired as couriers, to deliver portions of the book from the company's head office in Manhattan to the printing plant in Fairfield, Pennsylvania. At the printing plant, the book was given the code name \"Neil Armstrong\", after the first \"moonwalker\"."}
{"text":"Dedicated to Fred Astaire, the book discusses Jackson's show business friends, girlfriends and his rise to fame. The book also discusses Jackson's appearance and thoughts on plastic surgery. Jackson stated that up to that point, he had two rhinoplastic surgeries and the surgical creation of a cleft in his chin. He attributed the change in the structure of his face to puberty, weight loss, a strict vegetarian diet, a change in hair style and stage lighting."}
{"text":"In the book, Jackson tells of the beatings he received from his father, Joseph. While rehearsing with The Jackson 5, Jackson stated that when they messed up they \"got hit, sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a switch.\" The singer added that his father was \"real strict\" and \"something of a mystery\". In September 1988, Jackson telephoned his father to apologize for some of the material in the autobiography. He explained that he hadn't written the book himself and that the critical content was written by \"someone else\". The singer also reveals how much he has been hurt by the press, asking, \"What happened to truth? Did it go out of style?\""}
{"text":"\"Moonwalk\" debuted at number one on both the British newspaper \"The Times\" and the \"Los Angeles Times\" bestseller lists. Reaching number two in its first week on \"The New York Times\" Best Seller list, \"Moonwalk\" reached number one the following week. Within a few months of its release, \"Moonwalk\" had sold 450,000 copies in fourteen countries."}
{"text":"Ken Tucker, of \"The New York Times\", stated that if the book had been written by anyone else, it would be dismissed as \"an assiduously unrevealing, frequently tedious document.\" However, he adds that \"these are precisely the qualities that make it fascinating\"."}
{"text":"\"Moonwalk\" was re-released on October 13, 2009 as a result of Michael Jackson's death, with a new foreword by Motown founder Berry Gordy and afterword by Shaye Areheart."}
{"text":"Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye is a 1985 biography of American soul singer Marvin Gaye. The biography was written by music reviewer David Ritz including conversations he had with the singer, who put the biography together shortly after Gaye's death at the hands of his father Marvin Gay, Sr. in 1984."}
{"text":"The book came together after Gaye had contacted Ritz shortly after seeing a review Ritz had given on \"Rolling Stone\" about the album, \"Here, My Dear\", criticizing critics who he felt didn't get Marvin's message in the album, which was panned at the time of its release in late 1978."}
{"text":"Gaye and Ritz had ongoing conversations of the singer's life story, most of it recorded on audio tape. In 1982, while visiting Gaye in Belgium where he was on a self-imposed exile, Ritz continued work on the autobiography when Ritz searched Gaye's room finding explicit comic books, telling the singer, who struggled with depression and other issues, that he \"needed sexual healing\". An inspired Marvin convinced Ritz to write a few lyrics for what would be Marvin's comeback hit, \"Sexual Healing\". Gaye and Ritz continued conversations over the biography through 1983 when Gaye went on his U.S. tour promoting his \"Midnight Love\" album."}
{"text":"Their interviews ended abruptly after Gaye was shot and killed by his father on April 1, 1984. Devastated over Marvin's death, Ritz began writing the book and took quotes that Marvin had recited to him over his life from his troubled childhood being brought up in the Pentecostal faith by his father and suffering physical abuse from the same man, to his breakthrough years with Motown and his depression over the death of Tammi Terrell and his tumultuous relationships with Berry Gordy and his two wives Anna Gordy and Janis Hunter. The book was released in 1985 and became a best-seller upon release. A paperback edition was released the following year."}
{"text":"Ritz later re-released a new edition in 2003."}
{"text":"The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South is an American non-fiction book written by Michael W. Twitty. It was published in 2017 and is a food memoir. The author combines intensive genealogical and historical research as well as personal accounts to support the argument that the origin of southern cuisine is heavily based in the continent of Africa.The book was the recipient of the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing and Book of the Year."}
{"text":"Michael W. Twitty is a Jew by choice and notes within \"The Cooking Gene\" that the documentation and history found within Jewish cuisine inspired him to write it. The book takes a look at the social ecology surrounding the cuisine traditionally done by African Americans in the southern US. In the book, topics such as genealogy, chattel slavery, sexuality, gender, and spirituality are discussed in addition to foodways. Twitty adds discussions surrounding Soul Food, African American foodways, and Southern Cuisine."}
{"text":"\"The Cooking Gene i\"s about the influence that the enslavement of Africans by European settlers has had on foodways and history of the Old South. \"The Cooking Gene\" includes personal narratives, history, recipes, and folk songs. The recipes have African, Native American, and European roots as the author integrates his Jewish faith into African-American cooking. Twitty emphasizes the African flair that has been added to European and Native American ingredients by African American cooks. Additionally, he discusses plants used in cooking that are native to Africa such as sesame, okra, and sorghum."}
{"text":"\"The Cooking Gene\" also compares and contrasts Jewish and Black foodways, and discusses followers of Judaism in the south. Jewish and Black culinary traditions and items have mingled with each other both in the south and in northern cities. Twitty talks about his conversion to Judaism and expresses his fondness for Jewish cuisine."}
{"text":"\"The Cooking Gene\" has received positive reception as it has received praise for both its prose as well as what reviewers saw as unique elements that Twitty ties into the book. \"The Chicago Tribune\" commented on the work, calling it \"honest\" and \"lyrical.\" It has been named as one of NPR\u2019s Best Books of 2017 and one of \"Smithsonian Magazine\"'s Ten Best Books About Food in 2017."}
{"text":"My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first, \"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave\". The book depicts in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Following this liberation, Douglass, went on to become a prominent abolitionist, speaker, author, and advocate for women's rights."}
{"text":"The book included an introduction by James McCune Smith, who Douglass called the \"foremost black influence\" of his life."}
{"text":"Biography of a Slave: Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson is an early record of the experience of slavery, or \"slave narrative\" in the American south. It was published in 1875, and has been extensively cited by present-day historians studying slavery. Thompson describes in detail his childhood experiences as a slave. The work has been described as a \"witness text\", written to provide a historical record of experience."}
{"text":"Thompson goes on to describe his life as an adult slave, including being hired out to other plantations and teaching Christianity to his fellow slaves."}
{"text":"Charles Thompson was born near a town called Rockford, on March 3, 1833. His family belonged to a man named Kirkwood, a large slave owner with many different plantations. Thompson later became a preacher in the United Brethren Church."}
{"text":"Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the \"Harvard Law Review\" in 1990. According to \"The New York Times\", Obama modeled \"Dreams from My Father\" on Ralph Ellison's novel \"Invisible Man\"."}
{"text":"After Obama won the U.S. Senate Democratic primary victory in Illinois in 2004, the book was re-published that year. He gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and won the Illinois Senate seat in the fall. Obama launched his presidential campaign three years later. The 2004 edition includes a new preface by Obama and his DNC keynote address."}
{"text":"Pictured in left-hand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama Sr. (Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy, respectively). Pictured in right-hand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl)."}
{"text":"With the exception of family members and a handful of public figures, Barack Obama says in the 2004 preface that he had changed names of others to protect their privacy. He also created composite characters to expedite the narrative flow. Some of his acquaintances have recognized themselves and acknowledged their names. Various researchers have suggested the names of other figures in the book:"}
{"text":"In discussing \"Dreams from My Father\", Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate novelist, has called Obama \"a writer in my high esteem\" and the book \"quite extraordinary.\" She praised"}
{"text":"his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation\u2014all of these things that you don't often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography.\u00a0... It's unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that."}
{"text":"In an interview for \"The Daily Beast,\" the author Philip Roth said he had read \"Dreams from My Father\" \"with great interests,\" and commented that he had found it \"well done and very persuasive and memorable.\""}
{"text":"The audiobook edition earned Obama the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2006. Five days before being sworn in as President in 2009, Obama secured a $500,000 advance for an abridged version of \"Dreams from My Father\" for middle-school-aged children."}
{"text":"In 2011, \"Time Magazine\" listed the book on its top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923."}
{"text":"We Beat the Street: How a Friendship Pact Led to Success is an American autobiography aimed at young adults written by The Three Doctors and Sharon M. Draper on April 21, 2005. The novel shares the experiences of Dr. Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins as well as other professional authors."}
{"text":"\"We Beat the Street\" is the second novel that The Three Doctors were involved in writing, following the 2002 book \"The Pact\" and preceding the 2007 book \"The Bond\"."}
{"text":"\"We Beat the Street\" was a \"New York Times\" children's bestseller for the week ending June 25, 2005. The same year, the Association of Indiana School Library Educators selected the book as a \"Read-Aloud Too-Good-to-Miss\". In 2006, the book was chosen as a \"Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People\" by the National Council for the Social Studies and Children's Book Council. The book review committee stated that the book contained a \"true and inspiring\" autobiographical account."}
{"text":"Vicki Sherbert from \"The ALAN Review\" felt that the authors \"spoke honestly of their discouragement, failures, and successes\" and \"offer encouragement to kids who find themselves in hopeless situations.\" \"School Library Journal\"s Francisca Goldsmith thought that the writing was \"simple and accessible\", adding that \"there is plenty of action for reluctant readers.\" Gillian Engberg wrote in \"Booklist\" that the book contained inspirational stories and \"personal, intimate voices that frankly discuss big mistakes and complicated emotions\"."}
{"text":"Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his upbringing. Wright describes his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party. \"Black Boy\" gained high acclaim in the United States because of Wright\u2019s honest and profound depiction of racism in America. While the book gained significant recognition, much of the reception throughout and after the publication process was highly controversial."}
{"text":"\"Black Boy (American Hunger)\" is an autobiography following Richard Wright's childhood and young adulthood. It is split into two sections, \"Southern Night\" (concerning his childhood in the south) and \"The Horror and the Glory\" (concerning his early adult years in Chicago)."}
{"text":"In an effort to achieve his dreams of moving north, Wright steals and lies until he attains enough money for a ticket to Memphis. Wright\u2019s aspirations of escaping racism in his move North are quickly disillusioned as he encounters similar prejudices and oppressions amidst the people in Memphis, prompting him to continue his journeys towards Chicago."}
{"text":"At first, Wright thinks he will find friends within the party, especially among its black members, but he finds them to be just as timid to change as the southern whites he left behind. The Communists fear those who disagree with their ideas and quickly brand Wright as a \"counter-revolutionary\" for his tendency to question and speak his mind. When Richard tries to leave the party, he is accused of trying to lead others away from it."}
{"text":"After witnessing the trial of another black Communist for counter-revolutionary activity, Wright decides to abandon the party. He remains branded an \"enemy\" of Communism, and party members threaten him away from various jobs and gatherings. He does not fight them because he believes they are clumsily groping toward ideas that he agrees with: unity, tolerance, and equality. Wright ends the book by resolving to use his writing as a way to start a revolution: asserting that everyone has a \"hunger\" for life that needs to be filled. For Wright, writing is his way to the human heart, and therefore, the closest cure to his hunger."}
{"text":"The style in \"Black Boy\" is so highly regarded because of the frankness that defied social demands at the time of \"Black Boy\u2019s\" publication. Wright negates the racially based oppression he endured through his ability to read and write with eloquence and credibility as well as with his courage to speak back against the dominant norms of society that are holding him back."}
{"text":"The most general impact of \"Black Boy\" is shown through Wright\u2019s efforts to bring light to the complexities of race relations in America, both the seen and unseen. Given the oppression and lacking education for blacks in America, the raw honesty of their hardships was rarely heard and even more rarely given literary attention, making the impact of \"Black Boy\u2019s\" narrative especially influential. The book works to show the underlying inequalities that Wright faced daily in America."}
{"text":"Wright wrote the entire manuscript in 1943 under the working title, \"Black Confession.\" By December, when Wright delivered the book to his agent, he had changed the title to \"American Hunger.\" The first fourteen chapters, about his Mississippi childhood, are compiled in \"Part One: Southern Night,\" and the last six chapters, about Chicago, are included in \"Part Two: The Horror and the Glory.\" In January 1944, \"Harper and Brothers\" accepted all twenty chapters, and was for a scheduled fall publication of the book. \"Black Boy\" is currently published by HarperCollins Publisher as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook."}
{"text":"In June 1944, the Book of the Month Club expressed an interest in only \"Part One: Southern Night.\" In response, Wright agreed to eliminate the Chicago section, and in August, he renamed the shortened book as \"Black Boy.\" \"Harper and Brothers\" published it under that title in 1945 and it sold 195,000 retail copies in its first edition and 351,000 copies through the Book-of-the-Month Club."}
{"text":"Parts of the Chicago chapters were published during Wright's lifetime as magazine articles, but the six chapters were not published together until 1977, by \"Harper and Row\" as \"American Hunger.\" In 1991, the Library of America published all 20 chapters, as Wright had originally intended, under the title \"Black Boy (American Hunger)\" as part of their volume of Wright's \"Later Works\"."}
{"text":"The Book-of-the-Month-Club played an important role in Wright's career. It selected his 1940 novel, \"Native Son,\" as the first Book of the Month Club written by a black American. Wright was willing to change his \"Black Boy\" book to get a second endorsement. However, he wrote in his journal that the Book-of-the-Month-Club had yielded to pressure from the Communist Party in asking him to eliminate the chapters that dealt with his membership in and disillusionment with the Communist Party. In order for Wright to get his memoir really \u201cnoticed\u201d by the general public, his publisher required that he divide the portions of his book into two sections."}
{"text":"Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X is a 2002 book by Ilyasah Shabazz, the third daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz. Shabazz wrote the book with Kim McLarin."}
{"text":"In \"Growing Up X\", Shabazz writes about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of her father, a human rights activist who was assassinated when she was two years old. She also writes about her mother and sisters, and her early life growing up, along with her personal memories and feelings about Malcolm X. Shabazz has commented that she was nervous about releasing the book, because she did not want to ruin people's expectations of her, but has received unexpectedly great praise for her writing."}
{"text":"The Dark Room Collective was an influential African-American poetry collective. Established in 1988, the collective hosted a reading series that featured leading figures in Black literature."}
{"text":"After attending the funeral of literary icon James Baldwin in 1987, poets Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, then Harvard undergraduates, with poet-composer Janice Lowe, a Berklee College of Music student, co-founded the Dark Room Reading Series in 1988. The series was named for a project called \"The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing\", a library containing the works of black authors which was hosted in a former darkroom on the third floor of their Victorian house at 31 Inman Street in Cambridge."}
{"text":"The Dark Room Collective hosted a writing workshop and gatherings of black artists and writers at the house. They were visited by African-American writers including Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Derek Walcott, Samuel R. Delany, poet Essex Hemphill, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Mosley. They hosted a reading series that paired older writers with younger ones. The group was influenced by Rita Dove. Following problems with their landlord, they relocated the reading series to the Institute of Contemporary Art and later to the Boston Playwrights' Theatre."}
{"text":"The series ran through approximately 1998, though a \"reunion tour\" took place in 2012 and 2013."}
{"text":"The Dark Room Collective has been influential in contemporary American and African-American poetry, inspiring the creation of the Cave Canem Foundation and including many alumni who went on to be highly successful. Future United States Poets Laureate Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, \"New Yorker\" poetry editor Kevin Young, Carl Phillips, Major Jackson, Patrick Sylvain, Tisa Bryant, Danielle Legros Georges, Artress Bethany White, Trasi Johnson, Adisa Beatty, Nehassaiu deGannes, Donia Allen, Della Scott and John Keene were among the members of the collective."}
{"text":"African-American folktales are the storytelling and oral history of enslaved African Americans during the 1700-1900s. Many are unique to the African-American culture, while others are influenced by African, European, and Native American tales."}
{"text":"African-American folktales are a storytelling tradition based in Africa containing a rich oral tradition that expanded as Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves."}
{"text":"In general, most African-American Folktales fall into one of seven categories: tales of origin, tales of trickery and trouble, tales of triumph over natural or supernatural evils, comic heart warming tales, tales teaching life lessons, tales of ghosts and spirits, and tales of slaves and their slave-owners. Many revolve around animals which have human characteristics with the same morals and short comings as humans to make the stories relatable. New tales are based on the experiences of Africans in the Americas, while many of the traditional tales maintain their African roots. Although many of the original stories evolved since African Americans were brought to the Americas as slaves, their meaning and life lessons have remained the same."}
{"text":"African-American tales of origin center around beginnings and transformations whether focused on a character, event, or creation of the world. Some examples of origin stories includes \"How Jackal Became an Outcast\" and \"Terrapin's Magic Dipper and Whip\", that respectively explain the solitary nature of jackals and why turtles have shells."}
{"text":"Tricksters in folk stories are commonly amoral characters, both human and non-human animals, who 'succeed' based on deception and taking advantage of the weaknesses of others. They tend to use their wits to resolve conflict and\/or achieve their goals. Two examples of African-American tricksters are Brer Rabbit and Anansi."}
{"text":"Tricksters in African American folktales take a comedic approach and contain an underlying theme of inequality. The National Humanities Center notes that trickster stories \"contain serious commentary on the inequities of existence in a country where the promises of democracy were denied to a large portion of the citizenry, a pattern that becomes even clearer in the literary adaptations of trickster figures\"."}
{"text":"The folktales don't always contain an actual 'trickster' but a theme of trickery tactics. For example, Charles Chesnutt's collected a series of stories titled \"The Conjure Woman\" (1899). One of the story trickster tactics is \"how an enslaved man is spared being sent from one plantation to another by having his wife, who is a conjure woman, turn him into a tree...the trickery works until a local sawmill selects that particular tree to cut\"."}
{"text":"During the period of slavery, \"and for decades thereafter, trickster tales, with their subtly and indirection, were necessary because blacks could not risk a direct attack on white society\"."}
{"text":"Comic and heartwarming African-American folktales \u201cstimulate the imagination with wonders, and are told to remind us of the perils and the possibilities\u201d. The stories are about heroes, heroines, villains and fools. One story, The Red Feather, is a response to the intertwining of cultures, ending with heroes bringing forth gifts. Rabbit Rides Wolf is a story that represents the amalgamation of African and Creek descent where a combined hero emerges during a time of conflict ."}
{"text":"African folklore is a means to hand down traditions and duties through generations. Stories are often passed down orally at gatherings of groups of children. This type of gathering was known as Tales by Midnight and contained cultural lessons that prepared children for their future. A Diversity of animals with human characteristics made the stories compelling to the young children and included singing and dancing or themes such as greediness, honesty, and loyalty."}
{"text":"One story example used for generations of African children is the Tale of The Midnight Goat Thief that originated in Zimbabwe. The Midnight Goat Thief is a tale of misplaced trust and betrayal between two friends, a baboon and a hare, when a conflict between the two arises. The story teaches children to be loyal and honest."}
{"text":"African-American tales of ghosts and spirits were commonly told of a spook or \u201chaint\u201d or \u201chaunt,\u201d referring to repeated visits by ghosts or spirits that keep one awake at night. The story Possessed of Two Spirits is a personal experience in conjuring magic powers in both the living and the spiritual world common in African-American folklore. The story Married to a Boar Hog emerged during the colonial Revolution against the British. The story is of a young woman who married a supernatural being figure, such as a boar, who saves her from a disease like leprosy, club foot, or yaws. Married to a Boar Hog is passed down from British Caribbean slaves in reference to their African Origin and the hardships they endured."}
{"text":"African-American tales of slavery often use rhetoric that can seem uncommon to the modern era as the language passed down through generations deviates from the standard for racial narrative. The Conjure Woman, a book of tales dealing with racial identity, was written by the African-American author, Charles W. Chesnutt, from the perspective of a freed slave."}
{"text":"Chesnutt's tales represent the struggles freed slaves faced during the post-war era in the South. The author's tales provide a pensive perspective on the challenges of being left behind."}
{"text":"Chesnutt's language surrounding African American folklore derived from the standards of the racial narrative of his era. By using vernacular language, Chesnutt was able to deviate from the racial norms and formulate a new, more valorized message of folk heroes. Chesnutt writes \"on the other side\" of standard racial narratives, effectively refuting them by evoking a different kind of \"racial project\" in his fictional work.\u201d"}
{"text":"The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement, active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride."}
{"text":"Famously referred to by Larry Neal as the \u201caesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power,\" BAM applied these same political ideas to art and literature. The movement resisted traditional Western influences and found new ways to present the black experience."}
{"text":"The poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is widely recognized as the founder of BAM. In 1965, he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BART\/S) in Harlem. Baraka's example inspired many others to create organizations across the United States. While these organizations were short-lived, their work has had a lasting influence."}
{"text":"African Americans had always made valuable artistic contributions to American culture. However, due to brutalities of slavery and the systemic racism of Jim Crow, these contributions often went unrecognised. Despite continued oppression, African-American artists continued to create literature and art that would reflect their experiences. A high-point for these artists was the Harlem Renaissance\u2014a literary era that spotlighted black people."}
{"text":"There are many parallels that can be made between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. The link is so strong, in fact, that some scholars refer to the Black Arts Movement era as the Second Renaissance. One sees this connection clearly when reading Langston Hughes's \"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain\" (1926). Hughes's seminal essay advocates that black writers resist external attempts to control their art, arguing instead that the \u201ctruly great\u201d black artist will be the one who can fully embrace and freely express his blackness."}
{"text":"Yet, the Harlem Renaissance lacked many of the radical political stances that defined BAM. Inevitably, the Renaissance, and many of its ideas, failed to survive the Great Depression."}
{"text":"During the Civil Rights era, activists paid more and more attention to the political uses of art. The contemporary work of those like James Baldwin and Chester Himes would show the possibility of creating a new 'black aesthetic'. A number of art groups were established during this period, such as the Umbra Poets and the Spiral Arts Alliance, which can be seen as precursors to BAM."}
{"text":"Civil Rights activists were also interested in creating black-owned media outlets, establishing journals (such as \"Freedomways, Black Dialogue\", \"The Liberator\", \", The Black Scholar and Soul Book\") and publishing houses (such as Dudley Randall's Broadside Press and Third World Press.) It was through these channels that BAM would eventually spread its art, literature, and political messages."}
{"text":"The beginnings of the Black Arts Movement may be traced to 1965, when Amiri Baraka, at that time still known as Leroi Jones, moved uptown to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre\/School (BARTS) following the assassination of Malcolm X. Rooted in the Nation of Islam, the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement grew out of a changing political and cultural climate in which Black artists attempted to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience. Black artists and intellectuals such as Baraka made it their project to reject older political, cultural, and artistic traditions."}
{"text":"Although the Black Arts Movement was a time filled with black success and artistic progress, the movement also faced social and racial ridicule. The leaders and artists involved called for Black Art to define itself and speak for itself from the security of its own institutions. For many of the contemporaries the idea that somehow black people could express themselves through institutions of their own creation and with ideas whose validity was confirmed by their own interests and measures was absurd."}
{"text":"While it is easy to assume that the movement began solely in the Northeast, it actually started out as \"separate and distinct local initiatives across a wide geographic area,\" eventually coming together to form the broader national movement. New York City is often referred to as the \"birthplace\" of the Black Arts Movement, because it was home to many revolutionary Black artists and activists. However, the geographical diversity of the movement opposes the misconception that New York (and Harlem, especially) was the primary site of the movement."}
{"text":"In its beginning states, the movement came together largely through printed media. Journals such as \"Liberator\", \"The Crusader\", and \"Freedomways\" created \"a national community in which ideology and aesthetics were debated and a wide range of approaches to African-American artistic style and subject displayed.\" These publications tied communities outside of large Black Arts centers to the movement and gave the general black public access to these sometimes exclusive circles."}
{"text":"As a literary movement, Black Arts had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lennox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Tour\u00e9 (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Tour\u00e9, a major shaper of \"cultural nationalism,\" directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Tour\u00e9 joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS."}
{"text":"Another formation of black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O. Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement's aesthetics."}
{"text":"When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Tour\u00e9 and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented Uptown Writers Movement, which included poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse \"Willie\" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal. Accompanied by young \"New Music\" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem. Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS."}
{"text":"Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark (N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was irrepressible, mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-burgeoning Black Power movement."}
{"text":"The mid-to-late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964, rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide explosions of resentment and anger following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr."}
{"text":"Nathan Hare, author of \"The Black Anglo-Saxons\" (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University, where the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during the 1968\u201369 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College."}
{"text":"The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Tour\u00e9 and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black Arts movement was the US (as opposed to \"them\") organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam. These three formations provided both style and conceptual direction for Black Arts artists, including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the Black Arts Movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major forces were located outside New York City."}
{"text":"As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership, particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the \"Journal of Black Poetry\" and \"The Black Scholar\", and the Chicago\u2013Detroit axis because of \"Negro Digest\/Black World\" and Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) \"Black Theatre\" magazine, published by the New Lafayette Theatre, and \"Black Dialogue\", which had actually started in San Francisco (1964\u201368) and relocated to New York (1969\u201372)."}
{"text":"Although the journals and writing of the movement greatly characterized its success, the movement placed a great deal of importance on collective oral and performance art. Public collective performances drew a lot of attention to the movement, and it was often easier to get an immediate response from a collective poetry reading, short play, or street performance than it was from individual performances."}
{"text":"The people involved in the Black Arts Movement used the arts as a way to liberate themselves. The movement served as a catalyst for many different ideas and cultures to come alive. This was a chance for African Americans to express themselves in a way that most would not have expected."}
{"text":"As the movement grew, ideological conflicts arose and eventually became too great for the movement to continue to exist as a large, coherent collective."}
{"text":"Among these definitions, the central theme that is the underlying connection of the Black Arts, Black Aesthetic, and Black Power movements is then this: the idea of group identity, which is defined by Black artists of organizations as well as their objectives."}
{"text":"As there begins a change in the Black population, Trey Ellis points out other flaws in his essay \"The New Black Aesthetic.\" Blackness in terms of cultural background can no longer be denied in order to appease or please white \"or\" black people. From mulattos to a \"post-bourgeois movement driven by a second generation of middle class,\" blackness isn\u2019t a singular identity as the phrase \"The Black Aesthetic\" forces it to be but rather multifaceted and vast."}
{"text":"In his essay, Baraka says: \"The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us.\""}
{"text":"According to the Academy of American Poets, \"many writers--Native Americans, Latinos\/as, gays and lesbians, and younger generations of African Americans have acknowledged their debt to the Black Arts Movement.\" The movement lasted for about a decade, through the mid-1960s and into the 1970s. This was a period of controversy and change in the world of literature. One major change came through in the portrayal of new ethnic voices in the United States. English-language literature, prior to the Black Arts Movement, was dominated by white authors."}
{"text":"The Black Arts Movement, although short, is essential to the history of the United States. It spurred political activism and use of speech throughout every African-American community. It allowed African Americans the chance to express their voices in the mass media as well as become involved in communities."}
{"text":"It can be argued that \"the Black Arts movement produced some of the most exciting poetry, drama, dance, music, visual art, and fiction of the post-World War II United States\" and that many important \"post-Black artists\" such as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and August Wilson were shaped by the movement."}
{"text":"The Black Arts Movement also provided incentives for public funding of the arts and increased public support of various arts initiatives."}
{"text":"The movement has been seen as one of the most important times in African-American literature. It inspired black people to establish their own publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. It led to the creation of African-American Studies programs within universities. The movement was triggered by the assassination of Malcolm X. Among the well-known writers who were involved with the movement are Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Hoyt W. Fuller, and Rosa Guy. Although not strictly part of the Movement, other notable African-American writers such as novelists Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed share some of its artistic and thematic concerns. Although Reed is neither a movement apologist nor advocate, he said:"}
{"text":"I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that."}
{"text":"BAM influenced the world of literature with the portrayal of different ethnic voices. Before the movement, the literary canon lacked diversity, and the ability to express ideas from the point of view of racial and ethnic minorities, which was not valued by the mainstream at the time."}
{"text":"\"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised\" is a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album \"Small Talk at 125th and Lenox\", on which he recited the lyrics, accompanied by congas and bongo drums. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron's first single, \"Home Is Where the Hatred Is\", from his album \"Pieces of a Man\" (1971). It was also included on his compilation album, \"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised\" (1974). All these releases were issued on the Flying Dutchman Productions record label."}
{"text":"The song's title was originally a popular slogan among the 1960s Black Power movements in the United States. Its lyrics either mention or allude to several television series, advertising slogans and icons of entertainment and news coverage that serve as examples of what \"the revolution will not\" be or do. The song is a response to the spoken-word piece \"When the Revolution Comes\" by The Last Poets, from their eponymous debut, which opens with the line \"When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV\"."}
{"text":"It was inducted to the National Recording Registry in 2005."}
{"text":"Been There, Done That: Family Wisdom for Modern Times is a 2016 non-fiction book written by real life husband and wife Al Roker and Deborah Roberts."}
{"text":"An insight into the marriage of media personalities Al Roker and Deborah Roberts."}
{"text":"On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of Straight Black Men Who Sleep with Men is a 2004 New York Times Bestselling non-fiction book by J. L. King. The book was released in hardback on April 14, 2004 through Broadway Books and details the sexual lives of African-American men who are on the \"down low\" or having sex with men while posing or identifying as heterosexual. When the book was initially released, King denied claims that he was gay in both the book and in the media, but later confirmed that he was gay in 2010."}
{"text":"In the book King discusses the subject of African-American men who claim to be or otherwise consider themselves to be heterosexual, but hold secret sexual encounters with other men. The men give an outward appearance of only being heterosexual and will hold long-term relationships with women without informing the women or anyone else that they are having encounters, some of which are unprotected, with other men. King also discusses his own personal experience with living on the \"down low\", as well as what he perceives as potential risks and dangers that some forms of the lifestyle can bring."}
{"text":"Critical reception for \"On the Down Low\" was mostly positive, with Booklist calling the book \"a revealing look at an important social and health issue\". Robert Burns, director of Brother to Brother, criticized the book, stating that it \"perpetuates stereotypes\" and that the down low culture was \"more complex\" and \"doesn't just exist the way (King) explained it\"."}
{"text":"In 2005 King's ex-wife Brenda Stone Browder published \"On the Up and Up\", a non-fiction book that was described as both a \"survival guide\" and a biography of Browder's life before and after discovering King's activities."}
{"text":"John F. Callahan is literary executor for Ralph Ellison, and was the editor for his posthumously-released novel \"Juneteenth\". In addition to his work with Ellison, Callahan has written or edited numerous volumes related to African-American literature, with a particular emphasis on 20th century literature."}
{"text":"Some of Callahan's other works include \"In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in 20th Century Black Fiction\", \"Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook\", and \"The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald\". Callahan also edited Ellison's short story collection \"Flying Home\" and co-edited with Albert Murray the Modern Library edition of \"Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray\". As Darryl Pinckney has observed: \"Thanks to Callahan, there are more Ellison titles now than existed during his lifetime.\""}
{"text":"In 2010 Callahan published a fuller version of Ellison's unfinished second novel as \"Three Days Before the Shooting\"."}
{"text":"Callahan serves as the Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis & Clark College."}
{"text":"He earned his B.A. from the University of Connecticut and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois."}
{"text":"Callahan is the author of \"A Man You Could Love\", a novel published in 2007 by Fulcrum Publishing."}
{"text":"In 2015, Callahan donated his papers to the Lewis & Clark Archives."}
{"text":"Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence"}
{"text":"The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence is an annual national literary award designed to recognize rising African-American fiction writers. First awarded in 2007, the prize is underwritten by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation in honor of the literary heritage provided by author Ernest J. Gaines, with the winner receiving a cash award ($15,000 as of 2020) \"to support and enable the writer to focus on writing.\" It has been described as \"the nation's biggest prize for African-American writers\"."}
{"text":"Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown is a 1995 book by Tony Brown, published by William Morrow & Company."}
{"text":"Brown advocates for black self-reliance. He criticizes black politicians' ties to the Democratic Party. He stated that African-Americans make up four \"tribes\". Richard Kahlenberg of \"The Washington Post\"\"stated that \"conspiracy theories\", including those targeting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and saying that AIDS research funds are not distributed properly, make up about 33% of the content. Kahlenberg stated that the criticisms of affirmative action for wealthier minorities are \"flashes of insight\"."}
{"text":"The book was dedicated to his foster guardians, Elizabeth \"Mama\" Sanford and Mabel Holmes, Sanford's daughter."}
{"text":"Kahlenberg stated that Brown's \"sensationalist style that works better on television than in print\" undermines his \"legitimate criticisms\"."}
{"text":"\"Publishers Weekly\" stated that Brown \"undermines his case with a broad-brush assessment of the black community\", referring to the designation of tribes, \"and exaggerated references to black leaders' support for (and America's drift to) ``socialism.\"\""}
{"text":"The Black Renaissance in D.C. was a social, intellectual, and cultural movement in Washington, D.C. that began in 1919 and continued into the late 1920s."}
{"text":"Before the start of the Black Renaissance, Washington, D.C. developed an educated and prosperous Black middle class, made up of Black intellectuals and scholars who often studied at Howard University. Washington, D.C. had the country's largest Black community from 1900 to 1920, heavily influencing the development of the Black Renaissance in the area."}
{"text":"While the Black Renaissance movement ultimately began in Harlem, Manhattan, New York, with the Harlem Renaissance, the movement ultimately spread to cities across the United States. In Washington, D.C., the movement began on July 19, 1919, with the alleged sexual assault of a white woman by a black predator. The event was never confirmed, but it incited inflammatory responses from the four daily newspapers in the city. Several hundred whites formed a mob near Murder Bay off of Pennsylvania Avenue, a neighborhood known for prostitution and violence. The mob went on to assault a Black couple who were walking on 9th and D Streets, Southwest. Many prominent figures in the Harlem movement had strong roots in Washington, D.C. and heavily influenced the movement there."}
{"text":"U-Street was known as a place of entertainment and jazz music. The street was often referred to as \"Black Broadway\"."}
{"text":"Afro-Brazilian literature has existed in Brazil since the mid-19th century with the publication of Maria Firmina dos Reis's novel \"Ursula\" in 1859. Other writers from the late 19th century and early 20th century include Machado de Assis, Cruz e Sousa and Lima Barreto. Yet, Afro-Brazilian literature as a genre that recognized the ethnic and cultural origins of the writer did not gain national prominence in Brazil until the 1970s with the revival of Black Consciousness politics known as the Movimento Negro."}
{"text":"Literature written by individuals or groups of African ancestry in the present-day nation of Brazil, it can trace its origins to the 19th century. However, oral traditions of histories and narratives can be traced back to the 16th century when African slaves were brought across the Atlantic to work in the Portuguese colonies. Written forms of Afro-Brazilian literature do not appear until the 19th century with publications by writers such as Maria Firmina dos Reis, Cruz e Sousa and Machado de Assis."}
{"text":"There also existed during the 19th century a vast wealth of literature on Afro-Brazilians written by White Brazilians. Many of these writers were abolitionists that included Castro Alves, Joaquim Nabuco, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, and Naturalist writers that included Alu\u00edsio Azevedo, Jose Ver\u00edssimo, and Raul Pomp\u00e9ia. The well known Bahian author of the 20th century, Jorge Amado, also included many aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture and religion in many of his novels such as \"Tenda dos Milagres\" (\"Tent of Miracles\") and \"A Morte e a Morte de Quincas Berro D\u00e1gua\" (\"The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell\")."}
{"text":"With the largest population of African descendants outside of Africa found in Brazil, the importance of focusing on Afro-Brazilian literature has increased in recent years with the publication of multiple anthologies and literary criticisms revolving around Afro-Brazilian writers. Furthermore, Afro-Brazilian literature reflects the complex relationship between Brazil's long history of slavery, its politics of branqueamento (racial whitening) that were implemented by the Brazilian government during the late 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and the myth of racial democracy that pervaded and still exists within the Brazilian national consciousness."}
{"text":"Considered to be the greatest Brazilian writer and the first writer to be inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Machado de Assis was a mulatto (more specifically, a quadroon) whose grandparents were slaves."}
{"text":"An Afro-Brazilian literary group founded by a group of Paulistanos in 1980 by Cuti, Oswaldo de Camargo, Paulo Colina, Abelardo Rodrigues and others, its objective was to discuss and deepen the understanding of Afro-Brazilians in literature. It also desired to promote the habit of reading and to develop and to encourage studies, research and analysis concerning Black literature and culture. The group is best known for its annual publication of \"Cadernos Negros\" (Black Notebooks), an anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays by Afro-Brazilian writers, artists and intellectuals. In collaboration with other organizations and academic literary departments, they have created courses, seminars, and debates about Afro-Brazilian literature and questions of race in literature. Since 1999 the group is coordinated by Esmeralda Ribeiro and M\u00e1rcio Barbosa."}
{"text":"Best known for his novel \"Cidade de Deus\" (\"City of God\"), Paulo Lins currently teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. \"Cidade de Deus\" was the result of eight years of ethnographic fieldwork that Lins conducted in the favela of the same name and where he grew up as a child. Lins is currently working on a book that deals with slavery in Brazil since the 15th century."}
{"text":"Writing Black Britain 1948\u20131998 is an anthology of black British writings published in 2000 and edited by James Procter. The selection of writings includes many well-known writers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. This is an interdisciplinary collection and contains a variety of writings that discuss different forms of representation, i.e. films, music, and photography. It is centred on works of the diaspora, including Caribbean, African, and South Asian experiences. This collection is the first of its kind and critically engages with both the construction and community of \"black Britain\" and power relations. Every writer has something to say about their own positionality and how they've come to theorize black Britain."}
{"text":"The book is subdivided into three main parts covering distinct time periods: 1948 to late 1960s, later 1960s to mid-1980s, and mid-1980s to late 1990s. Each main part is framed by an introduction and then divided between \"literature\" and \"essays and documents\"."}
{"text":"While many anthologies following were filled with pieces written specifically for the anthology's publication, \"Writing Black Britain\" is a collection of previously published text. These pieces were initially compiled in order to prevent misinterpretation and inaccuracy about Black communities in Britain and Germany. Because of this, the anthology was aimed at speaking to mainstream white audiences in order to highlight the Black presence in European life."}
{"text":"When reading and discussing \"Writing Black Britain\", it is important to keep in mind the fact that it was designed for use in university coursework and the potential effect this may have had on what materials were and were not included for publication."}
{"text":"This anthology engages with blackness and the Caribbean Community in Britain, especially looking at migration and how art serves as resistance. The Caribbean Artists Movement began in Britain, giving this discussion local relevance. In the first section, Claudia Jones speaks to the cultural identity formation of Afro-Caribbeans."}
{"text":"Recognizing the centrality of black women struggles within the formation of a black Britain, within this anthology black women speak to power differentials and intersectionality in their essay. As Hazel Carby states, \"The fact that black women are subject to the 'simultaneous' oppression of patriarchy, class, and 'race' is the prime reason for not employing parallels that render their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible.\""}
{"text":"The anthology brings conversations to light, including the conversation\/debate that occurred between Stuart Hall, Darcus Howe, and Salman Rushdie. The Black Audio Film Collective released their film \"Handsworth Songs\" (1986), and there was much to say about it and its implications. The film looks at the \"riots\" of 1985 in Handsworth and South London."}
{"text":"The Atlantic Sound is a 2000 travel book by Caryl Phillips. It was published in the UK by Faber and Faber and in the US by Knopf. In the words of the \"Publishers Weekly\" review: \"Journeys, as forces of spiritual and cultural transformation, bind this trio of nonfiction narratives, which explores the legacy of slavery in each of the three major points of the transatlantic slave trade.\""}
{"text":"The book was described by \"Kirkus Reviews\" as: \"A splendidly honest and vividly detailed venture into some of history's darkest corners\u2014by a novelist who is also a superb reporter.\""}
{"text":"Gents is a novel by Warwick Collins first published in 1997. It is set in the unlikely environment of a \"Gentlemen's\" toilet, somewhere in London."}
{"text":"The story describes the lives of three West Indian immigrants who run a public urinal in London. Collins claimed it was stimulated in part by his memories of apartheid when he lived as a child in South Africa. The New York Times reviewer wrote: \"Mr. Collins is able to express, deftly, several contrasting views of homosexuality. ..., resolves to make up his own mind about \"alternative\" life styles and does precisely that, with a mixture of love and logic.\""}
{"text":"The Saga Prize was a literary award for new Black British novelists, which ran from 1995 to 1998."}
{"text":"The actress and writer Marsha Hunt established the Saga Prize in 1995 to recognise the literature emerging from indigenous black Britons' experiences. The prize \u2013 of \u00a33,000 and a book contract \u2013 was for unpublished first novels. To be eligible, entrants needed a black African ancestor and to have been born in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland. The prize was sponsored by the travel firm Saga plc. Judges included Andrea Levy and Margaret Busby."}
{"text":"The \"afrocentric\" nature of the Saga Prize and its restrictive definition of blackness caused controversy. The Commission for Racial Equality objected to its creation, and the Society of Authors refused to support it. The prize was successful, nevertheless, and ran for four years until 1998, winners including Diran Adebayo and Joanna Traynor."}
{"text":"Frances-Anne Solomon (born 28 June 1966) is a Caribbean British-Canadian filmmaker, writer, producer, and distributor. She lives between Toronto, Canada, and Barbados."}
{"text":"Born in England of Trinidadian parents, Frances-Anne Solomon began her professional life at the BBC in England, where she built a successful career as a producer, first with BBC Radio then with BBC television drama. She also produced and directed independent films through her company Leda Serene Films."}
{"text":"In 1999, she moved her company to Canada, where she continued to write, direct, and produce films, television programs, theatre plays, and new media projects."}
{"text":"In 2001, she founded CaribbeanTales, a charitable organisation producing, exhibiting and distributing educational multi-media projects based on Caribbean-heritage stories. The CaribbeanTales International Film Festival, founded in 2006 and based in Toronto, includes an annual festival, community screening series, and youth-focused film challenges. The CaribbeanTales Incubator Program develops original content for the regional and international market, CTFF also holds workshops and festivals in other territories, including to date Barbados, Belize, and Cuba. In 2010, Solomon founded CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution Inc, the first film distribution company in the English-speaking Caribbean dedicated to the marketing and sales of Caribbean-themed films. In 2014 she launched CaribbeanTales-TV, a video-on-demand platform."}
{"text":"Solomon is a Director member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences."}
{"text":"Solomon is the granddaughter of Trinidad and Tobago independence politician Dr. Patrick Solomon. When her grandfather left politics and took a role as a diplomat, the family lived in different countries including Canada, the United States, Europe and Venezuela. She moved back to Trinidad at nine years old, and attended the girls' \"prestige\" school, Bishop Anstey High School. At 18 she moved to Canada to live with her mother, and discovered a love of the arts, studying theatre at the University of Toronto's U.C. Playhouse, and poetry with Jay Macpherson. In 1986, she moved to England, to work for the BBC."}
{"text":"She trained in television production through the two-year BBC Production Training Program and worked with \"Ebony\", the Corporation's first Black magazine programme, before being hired as a Radio Drama producer in London. While there she was responsible for helping to introduce a number of initiatives aimed at diversifying the talent pool in BBC Radio Drama. Many great talents got their first entry to Radio Drama in this way, including actors Adjoa Andoh and Clarence Smith to the BBC Drama Repertory Company, producers Pam Fraser Solomon and Nandita Ghose, composer Dominique Le Gendre and writers Parv Bancil, Maya Chowdhry, Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta and Jackie Kay among others."}
{"text":"Solomon returned to television as a Script Editor for ScreenPlay, a strand of mostly studio-based TV dramas. Between 1992 and 1998 she worked as a script editor and then as a producer and executive producer for BBC Single Drama and Films under George S. J. Faber. For the BBC she produced and executive-produced feature films, including \"Speak Like a Child\", director John Akomfrah's narrative debut, and \"Love Is The Devil\", John Maybury's award-winning first feature. She credits her time at the BBC as providing her with a grounding, and vision of the importance and creative power of public service broadcasting."}
{"text":"In 1993, Solomon won a place on the prestigious BBC Drama Directors Course. While working as a Drama Producer for the BBC, she continued to run her own company Leda Serene Films, where she developed, produced and directed films including \"What My Mother Told Me\", a Trinidad-based autobiographical story of generational violence in the context of a middle-class family; and \"Peggy Su!\", produced by BBC Films. Set in a Chinese laundry in Liverpool in the 1960s, it remains one of the only British films to depict the lives of the Chinese in Britain."}
{"text":"Ultimately she found the racism of the British film and television industry constraining, and like many of her peers, chose to emigrate. Returning to Canada in 2000, she founded the CaribbeanTales Media Group and continued to develop and produce television, feature films and new media projects. \"Lord Have Mercy!\", produced with Claire Prieto and Vanz Chapman, was Canada's first multicultural sitcom, and starred Russell Peters alongside Caribbean stars Leonie Forbes and Dennis \"Sprangalang\" Hall. \"A Winter Tale\", CityTV, 2007, depicts a Caribbean-Canadian community plagued by gun violence in Toronto."}
{"text":"Solomon is the director of \"HERO\", a hybrid feature, inspired by elements of the life of Trinidad and Tobago war hero, judge and jurist Ulric Cross."}
{"text":"Solomon was the recipient of the 2018 Visionary Award from the ReelWorld Film Festival."}
{"text":"On 1 July 2019 Solomon was one of 842 new members invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. The 2019 class is 50% women, 29% people of color, and represents 59 countries."}
{"text":"CaribbeanTales Inc a not-for-profit company was formed in 2001, originally as an internet platform for Caribbean-themed film and arts. Early projects include CaribbeanTales.ca, a multimedia e-newsletter, and \"Literature Alive\", a multi-faceted project including an educational website, audio books, and a documentary series, profiling Caribbean authors, many of whom are based in Canada. The non-profit company became a registered Canadian charity in 2014."}
{"text":"In 2006, Solomon founded the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival in Toronto as a platform for Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora films and filmmakers from the region. The CaribbeanTales Youth Film Festival, during Black History Month in Toronto, screens Africentric films in schools and communities. The Film Festival Group has also produced festivals and events in Barbados and New York."}
{"text":"While teaching film at the University of the West Indies in 2009, she consolidated her connections in the region. This led to the creation of CaribbeanTales Worldwide Distribution, a Barbados-based company, and the first film distribution company dedicated to international distribution of Caribbean-themed audio visual content. The company was co-founded with cultural industries specialist Dr. Keith Nurse, businessman Terrence Farrell, and filmmakers Lisa Wickham and Mary Wells, with the goal to tackle head-on problems of the monetisation of Caribbean-themed content and the development of the Caribbean Film Industry."}
{"text":"The Creators of Colour Incubator (formerly CaribbeanTales Incubator Program), also founded in 2010, an annual program that takes place during the Toronto International Film Festival, aims to train filmmakers in the creation and marketing of sustainable content, and has been committed to helping to develop an infrastructure and international profile for Caribbean films, in the region and the diaspora."}
{"text":"The Program has evolved into a development and production hub for regional content. In 2015, CaribbeanTales won a five-year sponsorship and production deal with Flow, the brand name for Cable and Wireless Ltd, the largest telecommunications conglomerate in the Caribbean. The deal, brokered with Flow C.E.O John Reid, supports the production of at least three television series pilots a year from the CaribbeanTales Incubator Program. In 2016, the first of these projects were selected: \"Caribbean Girl NYC\" by Mariette Monpierre, \"Battledream Chronicle\" by Alain Bidard, and \"Heat\" by Menelik Shabazz. Production is underway in New York, Martinique and Barbados respectively. In 2017 Flow and CaribbeanTales expanded their relationship to give Flow subscribers around the Caribbean access to CaribbeanTales vast catalogue of films through Television on demand."}
{"text":"CaribbeanTales established an online VOD platform CaribbeanTales-TV."}
{"text":"Florence Onyebuchi \"Buchi\" Emecheta ( born in 21 July 1944, died in 25 January 2017) was a Nigerian novelist, based in the UK from 1962. she wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She authored more than 20 books, including \"Second Class Citizen\" (1974), \"The Bride Price\" (1976), \"The Slave Girl\" (1977) and \"The Joys of Motherhood\" (1979). Most of her early novels were published by Allison and Busby, where her editor was Margaret Busby."}
{"text":"Emecheta's themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education gained recognition from critics and honours. She once described her stories as \"stories of the world, where women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.\" Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity. She has been characterized as \"the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948\"."}
{"text":"From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976, she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she worked as a community worker in Camden, North London, meanwhile continuing to produce further novels with Allison and Busby \u2013 \"The Bride Price\" (1976), \"The Slave Girl\" (1977), \"The Joys of Motherhood\" (1979) and \"Destination Biafra\" (1982) \u2013 as well as the children's books \"Titch the Cat\" (1979) and \"Nowhere To Play\" (1980)."}
{"text":"Over the years, Emecheta worked with many cultural and literary organizations, including the Africa Centre, London, and with the Caine Prize for African Writing as a member of the Advisory Council."}
{"text":"Buchi Emecheta suffered a stroke in 2010, and she died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72."}
{"text":"Most of her fictional works are focused on sexual discrimination and racial prejudice informed by her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in the United Kingdom."}
{"text":"Among honours received during her literary career, Emecheta won the 1978 Jock Campbell Prize from the \"New Statesman\" (first won by Chinua Achebe's \"Arrow of God\") for her novel \"The Slave Girl\", and she was on \"Granta\" magazine's 1983 list of 20 \"Best of Young British Novelists\". She was a member of the British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race in 1979."}
{"text":"In September 2004, she appeared in the \"A Great Day in London\" photograph taken at the British Library, featuring 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature. In 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature."}
{"text":"She received an Honorary doctorate of literature from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1992."}
{"text":"Buchi Emecheta features at number 98 on a list of 100 women recognised in August 2018 by \"BBC History Magazine\" as having changed the world."}
{"text":"In March 2019, Camden Town Brewery launched a football kit using artwork featuring \"some of the most inspiring female icons to have influenced the brewery's home borough of Camden\"."}
{"text":"On 21 July 2019, which would have been Emecheta's 75th birthday, Google commemorated her life with a Doodle."}
{"text":"In October 2019 a new exhibition space in the library for students at Goldsmiths, University of London, was dedicated to Buchi Emecheta."}
{"text":"Pam Fraser Solomon FRSA is a British producer\/director of Guyanese heritage, whose work spans four decades in theatre, radio, film, television and education, winning prizes such as the Commission for Racial Equality \"Race in the Media Award\" in 1999. Her career in fringe and repertory theatre includes working for venues such as the Sheffield Crucible and the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and she is currently the Head of Creative Producing at Mountview drama school."}
{"text":"Speaking of how her Guyanese heritage and the experience of growing up in London as a Black woman has impacted her work, Fraser Solomon has said: \"People like me with experiences that can inform characterisation and storytelling, subtly changing the emphasis, can lead drama away from comfort zones. This doesn't make me better than others, but it makes my contribution equally valid. I see the world through the eyes of a Black woman, so in that sense all my intuition eventually leads back to that fact.\""}
{"text":"From 1991, Fraser Solomon was for 16 years a senior producer with BBC Radio, where she directed more than a hundred hours of audio dramas, and she was involved in major arts events such as the Africa95 and Africa '05 festivals, as well as the 2007 Abolition commemoration season. She wrote and produced for BBC Radio 4 in January 2001 the programme \"Stealing the Glory\", about the Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, presented by Colin Salmon."}
{"text":"Her television drama work encompasses producing several episodes of \"EastEnders\" and \"Holby City\", and she was the development producer for the BBC short film \"One Night In White Satin\". She was an executive producer of the 2007 BBC2 television documentary \"In Search of Wilberforce\", presented by Moira Stuart."}
{"text":"Continuing her career as a freelance producer, director and script editor, Fraser Solomon was involved in projects including the production of the documentary film \"Divided by Race, United in War and Peace\", about Caribbean war veterans and their struggles against colour prejudice and racism. She took up the position of Head of MA Creative Producing at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in 2018. She is also Co-Chair of Theatre Deli."}
{"text":"Among her awards as a producer\/director are a 1999 Commission for Racial Equality \"Race in the Media Award\" (RIMA) for Radio Drama as director of Margaret Busby's play based on C. L. R. James's novel \"Minty Alley\", first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 1998, featuring Geff Francis, Vivienne Rochester and Burt Caesar."}
{"text":"Fraser Solomon has served as a judge for prizes including The Whickers Radio & Audio Funding Award (RAFA)."}
{"text":"Caryl Phillips (born 13 March 1958) is a Kittitian-British novelist, playwright and essayist. Best known for his novels (for which he has won multiple awards), Phillips is often described as a writer, since much of his fictional output is defined by its interest in, and searching exploration of, the experiences of peoples of the African diaspora in England, the Caribbean and the United States. As well as writing, Phillips has worked as an academic at numerous institutions including Amherst College, Barnard College, and Yale University, where he has held the position of Professor of English since 2005."}
{"text":"At the age of 22, he visited St. Kitts for the first time since his family had left the island in 1958. The journey provided the inspiration for his first novel, \"The Final Passage\", which was published five years later. After publishing his second book, \"A State of Independence\" (1986), Phillips went on a one-month journey around Europe, which resulted in his 1987 collection of essays \"The European Tribe\". During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Phillips divided his time between England and St. Kitts while working on his novels \"Higher Ground\" (1989) and \"Cambridge\" (1991)."}
{"text":"In 1990, Phillips took up a Visiting Writer post at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He remained at Amherst College for a further eight years, becoming the youngest English tenured Professor in the US when he was promoted to that position in 1995. During this time, he wrote what is perhaps his best-known novel, \"Crossing the River\" (1993), which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. After taking up the position at Amherst, Phillips found himself doing \"a sort of triangular thing\" for a number of years, residing between England, St Kitts, and the U.S."}
{"text":"Finding this way of living both \"incredibly exhausting\" and \"prohibitively expensive\", Phillips ultimately decided to give up his residence in St. Kitts, though he says he still makes regular visits to the island. In 1998, he joined Barnard College, Columbia University, as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order. In 2005 he moved to Yale University, where he currently works as Professor of English. He was made an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2000, and an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2011."}
{"text":"Phillips has tackled themes on the African slave trade from many angles, and his writing is concerned with issues of \"origins, belongings and exclusion\", as noted by a reviewer of his 2015 novel \"The Lost Child\". Phillips's work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1993 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for \"Crossing the River\" and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book award for \"A Distant Shore\"."}
{"text":"Phillips received the PEN\/Beyond Margins Award for \"Dancing in the Dark\" in 2006."}
{"text":"Mary Jane Seacole (\"n\u00e9e\" Grant; 23 November 1805\u00a0\u2013 14 May 1881) was a British-Jamaican nurse, healer and businesswoman who set up the \"British Hotel\" behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as \"a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers\", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield, and nursed many of them back to health. Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African \"doctresses\", Seacole displayed \"compassion, skills and bravery while nursing soldiers during the Crimean War\", through the use of herbal remedies. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton."}
{"text":"Mary Seacole relied on her skill and experience as a healer and a doctress from Jamaica. Schools of nursing in England were only set up after the Crimean war, the first being the (Florence) Nightingale Training School, in 1860 at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Seacole was arguably the first nurse practitioner."}
{"text":"Hoping to assist with nursing the wounded on the outbreak of the Crimean War, Seacole applied to the War Office to be included among the nursing contingent but was refused, so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded. She became popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war."}
{"text":"In 1858 a four-day Fundraising Gala took place on the banks of the river Thames, to honour Mary Seacole. Crowds of about 80,000 attended, including veterans, their families and Royalty."}
{"text":"After her death she was largely forgotten for almost a century, but was subsequently recognised for her success as a woman. Her autobiography, \"Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands\" (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although some aspects of its accuracy have been questioned by present-day supporters of Florence Nightingale. The erection of a statue of her at St Thomas' Hospital, London, on 30 June 2016, describing her as a \"pioneer\", has generated controversy and opposition from Nightingale enthusiasts, such as Lynn McDonald, and others researching the period."}
{"text":"Mary Jane Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, in the Colony of Jamaica, the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish Lieutenant in the British Army, and a free Jamaican woman. Her mother, Mrs Grant, nicknamed \"The Doctress\", was a healer who used traditional Caribbean and African herbal medicines. Mrs Grant also ran Blundell Hall, a boarding house at 7 East Street, which was considered one of the best hotels in all of Kingston."}
{"text":"At Blundell Hall, Seacole acquired her nursing skills, which included the use of hygiene, ventilation, warmth, hydration, rest, empathy, good nutrition and care for the dying. Blundell Hall also served as a convalescent home for military and naval staff recuperating from illnesses such as cholera and yellow fever. Seacole's autobiography says she began experimenting in medicine, based on what she learned from her mother, by ministering to a doll and then progressing to pets before helping her mother treat humans. Because of her family's close ties with the army, she was able to observe the practices of military doctors, and combined that knowledge with the West African remedies she acquired from her mother."}
{"text":"In Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, neonatal deaths were more than a quarter of total births, at a time when British-Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood wrote about European doctors employing questionable practices such as mercury pills and the bleeding of the patient. However, Seacole, using traditional West African herbal remedies and hygienic practices, boasted that she never lost a mother or her child."}
{"text":"Mary Seacole spent some years in the household of an elderly woman, whom she called her \"kind patroness\", before returning to her mother. She was treated as a member of her patroness's family and received a good education. As the educated daughter of a Scottish officer and a free black woman with a respectable business, Seacole would have held a high position in Jamaican society."}
{"text":"In about 1821, Seacole visited London, staying for a year, and visited her relatives in the merchant Henriques family. Although London had a number of black people, she records that a companion, a West Indian with skin darker than her own \"dusky\" shades, was taunted by children. Seacole herself was \"only a little brown\"; she was nearly white according to one of her biographers, Dr. Ron Ramdin. She returned to London approximately a year later, bringing a \"large stock of West Indian pickles and preserves for sale\". Her later travels would be as an \"unprotected\" woman, without a chaperone or sponsor \u2013 an unusually independent practice at a time when women had limited rights."}
{"text":"After returning to Jamaica, Seacole cared for her \"old indulgent patroness\" through an illness, finally returning to the family home at Blundell Hall after the death of her patroness (a woman who gave financial support to her) a few years later. Seacole then worked alongside her mother, occasionally being called to provide nursing assistance at the British Army hospital at Up-Park Camp. She also travelled the Caribbean, visiting the British colony of New Providence in The Bahamas, the Spanish colony of Cuba, and the new Republic of Haiti. Seacole records these travels, but omits mention of significant current events, such as the Christmas Rebellion in Jamaica of 1831, the abolition of slavery in 1833, and the abolition of \"apprenticeship\" in 1838."}
{"text":"During 1843 and 1844, Seacole suffered a series of personal disasters. She and her family lost much of the boarding house in a fire in Kingston on 29 August 1843. Blundell Hall burned down, and was replaced by New Blundell Hall, which was described as \"better than before\". Then her husband died in October 1844, followed by her mother. After a period of grief, in which Seacole says she did not stir for days, she composed herself, \"turned a bold front to fortune\", and assumed the management of her mother's hotel. She put her rapid recovery down to her hot Creole blood, blunting the \"sharp edge of [her] grief\" sooner than Europeans who she thought \"nurse their woe secretly in their hearts\"."}
{"text":"Seacole absorbed herself in work, declining many offers of marriage. She later became known to the European military visitors to Jamaica who often stayed at Blundell Hall. She treated and nursed patients in the cholera epidemic of 1850, which killed some 32,000\u00a0Jamaicans."}
{"text":"The epidemic raged through the population. Seacole later expressed exasperation at their feeble resistance, claiming they \"bowed down before the plague in slavish despair\". She performed an autopsy on an orphan child for whom she had cared, which gave her \"decidedly useful\" new knowledge. At the end of this epidemic she herself contracted cholera, forcing her to rest for several weeks. In her autobiography, \"The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands\", she describes how the residents of Cruces responded: \"When it became known that their \"yellow doctress\" had the cholera, I must do the people of Cruces the justice to say that they gave me plenty of sympathy, and would have shown their regard for me more actively, had there been any occasion.\""}
{"text":"Cholera was to return again: Ulysses S. Grant passed through Cruces in July 1852, on military duty; a hundred and twenty men, a third of his party, died of the disease there or shortly afterwards en route to Panama City."}
{"text":"Despite the problems of disease and climate, Panama remained the favoured route between the coasts of the United States. Seeing a business opportunity, Seacole opened the British Hotel, which was a restaurant rather than an hotel. She described it as a \"tumble down hut,\" with two rooms, the smaller one to be her bedroom, the larger one to serve up to 50 diners. She soon added the services of a barber."}
{"text":"The Crimean War lasted from October 1853 until 1 April 1856 and was fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire. The majority of the conflict took place on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea and Turkey."}
{"text":"Many thousands of troops from all the countries involved were drafted to the area, and disease broke out almost immediately. Hundreds perished, mostly from Cholera. Hundreds more would die waiting to be shipped out, or on the voyage. Their prospects were little better when they arrived at the poorly staffed, unsanitary and overcrowded hospitals which were the only medical provision for the wounded. In Britain, a trenchant letter in \"The Times\" on 14 October triggered Sidney Herbert, Secretary of State for War, to approach Florence Nightingale to form a detachment of nurses to be sent to the hospital to save lives. Interviews were quickly held, suitable candidates selected, and Nightingale left for Turkey on 21 October."}
{"text":"Nightingale reportedly wrote, \"I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs Seacole's advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!)...Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness - also much drunkenness and improper conduct\"."}
{"text":"Seacole finally resolved to travel to Crimea using her own resources and to open the British Hotel. Business cards were printed and sent ahead to announce her intention to open an establishment, to be called the \"British Hotel\", near Balaclava, which would be \"a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers\". Shortly afterwards, her Caribbean acquaintance, Thomas Day, arrived unexpectedly in London, and the two formed a partnership. They assembled a stock of supplies, and Seacole embarked on the Dutch screw-steamer \"Hollander\" on 27 January 1855 on its maiden voyage, to Constantinople. The ship called at Malta, where Seacole encountered a doctor who had recently left Scutari. He wrote her a letter of introduction to Nightingale."}
{"text":"Seacole visited Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, where she asked for a bed for the night. Seacole wrote, \"Mrs. B. questions me very kindly, but with the same look of curiosity and surprise. What object has Mrs. Seacole in coming out? This is the purport of her questions. And I say, frankly, to be of use somewhere; for other considerations I had not, until necessity forced them upon me. Willingly, had they accepted me, I would have worked for the wounded, in return for bread and water. I fancy Mrs. B\u2014 thought that I sought for employment at Scutari, for she said, very kindly \u2013 \"Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy \u2013 \""}
{"text":"After transferring most of her stores to the transport ship \"Albatross\", with the remainder following on the \"Nonpareil\", she set out on the four-day voyage to the British bridgehead into Crimea at Balaclava. Lacking proper building materials, Seacole gathered abandoned metal and wood in her spare moments, with a view to using the debris to build her hotel. She found a site for the hotel at a place she christened Spring Hill, near Kadikoi, some along the main British supply road from Balaclava to the British camp near Sevastopol, and within a mile of the British headquarters."}
{"text":"The hotel was completed in July at a total cost of \u00a3800. It included a building made of iron, containing a main room with counters and shelves and storage above, an attached kitchen, two wooden sleeping huts, outhouses, and an enclosed stable-yard. The building was stocked with provisions shipped from London and Constantinople, as well as local purchases from the British camp near Kadikoi and the French camp at nearby Kamiesch. Seacole sold anything \u2013 \"from a needle to an anchor\"\u2014to army officers and visiting sightseers. Meals were served at the Hotel, cooked by two black cooks, and the kitchen also provided outside catering."}
{"text":"Despite constant thefts, particularly of livestock, Seacole's establishment prospered. Chapter XIV of \"Wonderful Adventures\" describes the meals and supplies provided to officers. They were closed at 8 pm daily and on Sundays. Seacole did some of the cooking herself: \"Whenever I had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands, roll up my sleeves, and roll out pastry.\" When called to \"dispense medications,\" she did so. Soyer was a frequent visitor, and praised Seacole's offerings, noting that she offered him champagne on his first visit."}
{"text":"To Soyer, near the time of departure, Florence Nightingale acknowledged favourable views of Seacole, consistent with their one known meeting in Scutari. Soyer's remarks\u2014he knew both women\u2014show pleasantness on both sides. Seacole told him of her encounter with Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital: \"You must know, M Soyer, that Miss Nightingale is very fond of me. When I passed through Scutari, she very kindly gave me board and lodging.\" When he related Seacole's inquiries to Nightingale, she replied \"with a smile: 'I should like to see her before she leaves, as I hear she has done a deal of good for the poor soldiers.'\" Nightingale, however, did not want her nurses associating with Seacole, as she wrote to her brother-in-law."}
{"text":"Seacole often went out to the troops as a sutler, selling her provisions near the British camp at Kadikoi, and nursing casualties brought out from the trenches around Sevastopol or from the Tchernaya valley. She was widely known to the British Army as \"Mother Seacole\"."}
{"text":"After the fall of Sevastopol, hostilities continued in a desultory fashion. The business of Seacole and Day prospered in the interim period, with the officers taking the opportunity to enjoy themselves in the quieter days. There were theatrical performances and horse-racing events for which Seacole provided catering."}
{"text":"Seacole was joined by a 14-year-old girl, Sarah, also known as Sally. Soyer described her as \"the Egyptian beauty, Mrs Seacole's daughter Sarah\", with blue eyes and dark hair. Nightingale alleged that Sarah was the illegitimate offspring of Seacole and Colonel Henry Bunbury. However, there is no evidence that Bunbury met Seacole, or even visited Jamaica, at a time when she would have been nursing her ailing husband. Ramdin speculates that Thomas Day could have been Sarah's father, pointing to the unlikely coincidences of their meeting in Panama and then in England, and their unusual business partnership in Crimea."}
{"text":"Sociology professor Lynn McDonald is co-founder of The Nightingale Society, which promotes the legacy of Nightingale, who did not see eye-to-eye with Seacole. McDonald believes that Seacole's role in the Crimean War was overplayed:"}
{"text":"\"Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands\"."}
{"text":"The \"Illustrated London News\" received the autobiography favorably agreeing with the statements made in the preface \"If singleness of heart, true charity and Christian works- of trials and sufferings, dangers and perils, encountered boldly by a helpless women on her errand of mercy in the camp and in the battlefield can excite sympathy or move curiosity, Mary Seacole will have many friends and many readers\"."}
{"text":"In 2017 Robert McCrum chose it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books, calling it \"gloriously entertaining\"."}
{"text":"Seacole joined the Roman Catholic Church circa 1860, and returned to a Jamaica changed in her absence as it faced economic downturn. She became a prominent figure in the country. However, by 1867 she was again running short of money, and the Seacole fund was resurrected in London, with new patrons including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Cambridge, and many other senior military officers. The fund burgeoned, and Seacole was able to buy land on Duke Street in Kingston, near New Blundell Hall, where she built a bungalow as her new home, plus a larger property to rent out."}
{"text":"By 1870, Seacole was back in London, living at 40 Upper Berkley St., St. Marylebone. Robinson speculates that she was drawn back by the prospect of rendering medical assistance in the Franco-Prussian War. It seems likely that she approached Sir Harry Verney (the husband of Florence Nightingale's sister Parthenope) Member of Parliament for Buckingham who was closely involved in the British National Society for the Relief of the Sick and Wounded. It was at this time Nightingale wrote her letter to Verney insinuating that Seacole had kept a \"bad house\" in Crimea, and was responsible for \"much drunkenness and improper conduct\"."}
{"text":"In London, Seacole joined the periphery of the royal circle. Prince Victor (a nephew of Queen Victoria; as a young Lieutenant he had been one of Seacole's customers in Crimea) carved a marble bust of her in 1871 that was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1872. Seacole also became personal masseuse to the Princess of Wales who suffered with white leg and rheumatism."}
{"text":"While well known at the end of her life, Seacole rapidly faded from public memory in Britain. However, in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her and efforts to acknowledge her achievements. She was cited as an example of \"hidden\" black history in Salman Rushdie's \"The Satanic Verses\" (1988), like Olaudah Equiano: \"See, here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence's candle.\""}
{"text":"She has been better remembered in Jamaica, where significant buildings were named after her in the 1950s: the headquarters of the Jamaican General Trained Nurses' Association was christened \"Mary Seacole House\" in 1954, followed quickly by the naming of a hall of residence of the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and a ward at Kingston Public Hospital was also named in her memory. More than a century after her death, Seacole was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991."}
{"text":"Her grave in London was rediscovered in 1973; a service of reconsecration was held on 20 November 1973, and her gravestone was also restored by the British Commonwealth Nurses' War Memorial Fund and the Lignum Vitae Club. Nonetheless, when scholarly and popular works were written in the 1970s about the Black British presence in Britain, she was absent from the historical record, and went unrecorded by Dominican-born scholar Edward Scobie and Nigerian historian Sebastian Okechukwu Mezu."}
{"text":"The centenary of her death was celebrated with a memorial service on 14 May 1981 and the grave is maintained by the Mary Seacole Memorial Association, an organization founded in 1980 by Jamaican-British Auxiliary Territorial Service corporal, Connie Mark. An English Heritage blue plaque was erected by the Greater London Council at her residence in 157 George Street, Westminster, on 9 March 1985, but it was removed in 1998 before the site was redeveloped. A \"green plaque\" was unveiled at 147 George Street, in Westminster, on 11 October 2005. However, another blue plaque has since been positioned at 14 Soho Square, where she lived in 1857."}
{"text":"By the 21st century, Seacole was much more prominent. Several buildings and entities, mainly connected with health care, were named after her. In 2005, British politician Boris Johnson wrote of learning about Seacole from his daughter's school pageant and speculated: \"I find myself facing the grim possibility that it was my own education that was blinkered.\" In 2007 Seacole was introduced into the National Curriculum, and her life story is taught at many primary schools in the UK alongside that of Florence Nightingale."}
{"text":"She was voted into first place in an online poll of 100 Great Black Britons in 2004. The portrait identified as Seacole in 2005 was used for one of ten first-class stamps showing important Britons, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery."}
{"text":"An annual prize to recognise and develop leadership in nurses, midwives and health visitors in the National Health Service was named Seacole, to \"acknowledge her achievements\". The NHS Leadership Academy has developed a six-month leadership course called the Mary Seacole Programme, which is designed for first time leaders in healthcare. An exhibition to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth opened at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London in March 2005. Originally scheduled to last for a few months, the exhibition was so popular that it was extended to March 2007."}
{"text":"A campaign to erect a statue of Seacole in London was launched on 24 November 2003, chaired by Clive Soley, Baron Soley. The design of the sculpture by Martin Jennings was announced on 18 June 2009. There was significant opposition to the siting of the statue at the entrance of St Thomas' Hospital, but it was unveiled on 30 June 2016. The words written by Russell in \"The Times\" in 1857 are etched on to Seacole's statue: \"I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.\""}
{"text":"A biopic feature film is being made of her life by Racing Green Pictures and producer Billy Peterson. The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Mary Seacole. A short animation about Mary Seacole was adapted from a book entitled \"Mother Seacole\", published in 2005 as part of the bicentenary celebrations. Seacole is featured in BBC's \"Horrible Histories\", where she is portrayed by Dominique Moore. Viewer complaints about the show led the BBC Trust to conclude that the episode's portrayal of \"racial issues was materially inaccurate\"."}
{"text":"A two-dimensional sculpture of Seacole was erected in Paddington in 2013. On 14 October 2016, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle."}
{"text":"An article by Lynn McDonald in \"The Times Literary Supplement\" asked \"How did Mary Seacole come to be viewed as a pioneer of modern nursing?\", comparing her unfavourably with Kofoworola Pratt who was the first black nurse in the NHS, and concluded \"She deserves much credit for rising to the occasion, but her tea and lemonade did not save lives, pioneer nursing or advance health care\"."}
{"text":"In January 2013 Operation Black Vote launched a petition to request Education Secretary Michael Gove to drop neither her nor Olaudah Equiano from the National Curriculum. Rev. Jesse Jackson and others wrote a letter to \"The Times\" protesting against the mooted removal of Mary Seacole from the National Curriculum. This was declared successful on 8 February 2013 when the DfE opted to leave Seacole on the curriculum."}
{"text":"David Adetayo Olusoga (born January 1970) is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and film-maker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to \"The One Show\" and \"The Guardian\"."}
{"text":"David Olusoga was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and British mother. At five years old, Olusoga migrated to the UK with his mother and grew up in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. He was one of a very few non-white people living on a council estate. By the time he was 14, the National Front had attacked his house on more than one occasion, requiring police protection for him and his family. They were eventually forced to leave as a result of the racism. He later attended the University of Liverpool to study the history of slavery, and in 1994, graduated with a BA (Hons) History degree, followed by a postgraduate course in broadcast journalism at Leeds Trinity University."}
{"text":"Olusoga began his TV career behind the camera, first as a researcher on the 1999 BBC series \"Western Front\". Realising that black people were much less visible in the media and historically, Olusoga became a producer of history programmes after university, working from 2005 on programmes such as \"Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich\", \"The Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith\" and \"Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner?\"."}
{"text":"Subsequently he became a television presenter, beginning in 2014 with \"The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire\", about the Indian, African and Asian troops who fought in the First World War, followed by several other documentaries and appearances on BBC One television's \"The One Show\". In 2015 it was announced that he would co-present \"Civilisations\", a sequel to Kenneth Clark's 1969 television documentary series \"Civilisation\", alongside the historians Mary Beard and Simon Schama. His most recent TV series include \"\", \"The World's War\", \"A House Through Time\" and the BAFTA award-winning \"Britain\u2019s Forgotten Slave Owners\"."}
{"text":"Olusoga was included in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the \"Powerlist\", a ranking of the 100 most influential Black Britons, and in the 2021 edition he made the Top 10 most influential, ranking eighth."}
{"text":"He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to history and to community integration. He received his medal from the Queen in January 2019."}
{"text":"On appointing him as a professor in 2019, the University of Manchester described him as an expert on military history, empire, race and slavery, and \"one of the UK's foremost historians\". Olusoga gave his inaugural professorial lecture on \"Identity, Britishness and the \"Windrush\"\" at the University of Manchester in May 2019."}
{"text":"In response to the global Black Lives Matter movement with protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, Olusoga's \"Black and British: A Forgotten History\" was re-broadcast on the BBC and made available on BBC iPlayer along with \"Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners\", also fronted by him."}
{"text":"On 13 November 2020, the BBC announced that it had commissioned \"Barack Obama Talks To David Olusoga\", a special programme in which President Obama discusses the first volume of his presidential memoirs, \"A Promised Land\". The programme aired on 19 January 2021."}
{"text":"In January 2021 Olusoga appeared on BBC Radio 4's \"Desert Island Discs\", where he discussed his childhood experiences of racism and his love of blues music. Among his choices of music were \"Can't Blame the Youth\" by Bob Marley and the Wailers and \"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground\" by Blind Willie Johnson. His luxury item was an acoustic guitar and his choice of book was \"The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920\u201340\"."}
{"text":"George Lamming (born 8 June 1927) is a Bajan novelist, essayist and poet and an important figure in Caribbean literature, who first won critical acclaim with his debut novel, \"In the Castle of My Skin\" (1953). He has held academic posts including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and has lectured extensively worldwide."}
{"text":"George William Lamming was born on 8 June 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write."}
{"text":"\"The emigrants were largely men in search of work. My friend and fellow traveller, the late Samuel Selvon of Trinidad, was a poet and short-story writer then halfway through his first novel, A Brighter Sun. Sam and I had left home for the same reason - to make a career as a writer. This was a journey to an expectation, and between 1948 and 1960 every West Indian novelist of significance within their region made a similar journey: Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittleholzer, Ian Carew of Guyana, Roger Mais, Andrew Salkey and John Hearne of Jamaica."}
{"text":"In 1951 Lamming became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine \"Bim\", edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's \"Caribbean Voices\" radio series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on \"Caribbean Voices\", including some by the young Derek Walcott."}
{"text":"He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies, Kingston (1967\u201368). Since then, he has been a visiting professor in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Brown University, Cornell University, and Duke University and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Lamming also directed the University of Miami's Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing."}
{"text":"In April 2012, he was chair of the judges for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and served as chief judge for the inaugural Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing 2014."}
{"text":"Lamming is the author of six novels: \"In the Castle of My Skin\" (1953), \"The Emigrants\" (1954), \"Of Age and Innocence\" (1958), \"Season of Adventure\" (1960), \"Water with Berries\" (1971) and \"Natives of My Person\" (1972). His much acclaimed first novel, \"In the Castle of My Skin\", featuring an autobiographical character named G., can be read as both a coming-of-age story as well as the story of the Caribbean."}
{"text":"His 1960 collection of essays, \"The Pleasures of Exile\", is a pioneering work that attempts to define the place of the West Indian in the post-colonial world, re-interpreting Shakespeare's \"The Tempest\" and the characters of Prospero and Caliban in terms of personal identity and the history of the Caribbean."}
{"text":"A more recent (1995) collection of essays is \"Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II \u2013 Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual\"."}
{"text":"Brown University held a two-day series of events celebrating Lamming, 8\u20139 March 2011."}
{"text":"In May 2011 the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) awarded Lamming the first Caribbean Hibiscus Award in acknowledgement of his lifetime's work. In 2014, he won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards."}
{"text":"George Lamming Primary School, located at Flint Hall, St Michael, was named in his honour and opened on 2 September 2008."}
{"text":"His work is celebrated through the George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, housed at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI), with annual distinguished lecture series held annually in June, the month of Lamming's birth. His personal literary collection is housed at the Sidney Martin Library, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados."}
{"text":"Nadifa Mohamed (, ) is a Somali-British novelist. She featured on \"Granta\" magazine's list \"Best of Young British Novelists\" in 2013, and in 2014 on the Africa39 list of writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature. She has also written short stories, essays, memoirs and articles in outlets including \"The Guardian\", and contributed poetry to the anthology \"New Daughters of Africa\" (ed. Margaret Busby, 2019)."}
{"text":"Mohamed was born in 1981 in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Her father was a sailor in the merchant navy and her mother was a local landlady. In 1986, she moved with her family to London for what was intended to be a temporary stay. However, the civil war broke out shortly afterwards in Somalia, so they remained in the UK."}
{"text":"Mohamed later attended the University of Oxford, where she studied history and politics. In 2008, she visited Hargeisa for the first time in over a decade."}
{"text":"Mohamed resides in London and is working on her third novel."}
{"text":"In 2013, Mohamed released her second novel, \"The Orchard of Lost Souls\". Set in Somalia on the eve of the civil war, it was published by Simon & Schuster. Reviewing it in \"The Independent\", Arifa Akbar said: \"If Mohamed's first novel was about fathers and sons ... this one is essentially about mothers and daughters.\" In 2014 \"The Orchard of Lost Souls\" won the Somerset Maugham Award and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize."}
{"text":"In December 2013, Mohamed was one of 36 writer and translator participants at the Doha International Book Fair's Literary Translation Summit in Qatar."}
{"text":"She was chosen as one of \"Granta\" magazine's \"Best of Young British Novelists\" in 2013, and in April 2014 was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with potential and talent to define future trends in African literature."}
{"text":"Her writing has also been published in such outlets as \"The Guardian\" and Literary Hub, as well as in the anthology \"New Daughters of Africa\" (2019), which includes poetry by Mohamed."}
{"text":"In June 2018 Mohamed was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its \"40 Under 40\" initiative."}
{"text":"Jacqueline Margaret Kay, (born 9 November 1961), is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works \"Other Lovers\" (1993), \"Trumpet\" (1998) and \"Red Dust Road\" (2011). Kay has won a number of awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011."}
{"text":"Since 2016, she has been Scots Makar, the national poet laureate of Scotland. She was appointed as chancellor of the University of Salford in 2015."}
{"text":"Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961, to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. They adopted Jackie in 1961, having already adopted her brother, Maxwell, about two years earlier. Jackie and Maxwell also have siblings who were brought up by their biological parents."}
{"text":"Her adoptive father worked for the Communist Party full-time and stood for Member of Parliament, and her adoptive mother was the Scottish secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As a child Kay suffered racism from children and teachers at school. John Kay died in 2019 at the age of 94."}
{"text":"As a teenager she worked as a cleaner, working for David Cornwell\u2014who wrote under the pen-name John le Carr\u00e9\u2014for four months. She recommended cleaning work to aspiring writers, saying: \"It\u2019s great ... You\u2019re listening to everything. You can be a spy, but nobody thinks you're taking anything in.\" Cornwell and Kay met again in 2019; he remembered her, and had been following her."}
{"text":"In August 2007, Jackie Kay was the subject of the fourth episode of the BBC Radio 4 series \"The House I Grew Up In\", in which she talked about her childhood."}
{"text":"In 1997, Kay published a biography of blues singer Bessie Smith, which was reissued in 2021. An abridged version read by the author featured as BBC Radio 4's \"Book of the Week\" in the last week of February 2021."}
{"text":"Kay writes extensively for stage (in 1988 her play \"Twice Over\" was the first by a Black writer to be produced by Gay Sweatshop Theatre Group), screen and for children. Her drama \"The Lamplighter\" is an exploration of the Atlantic slave trade. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2007, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon, during a season marking the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act 1807, and was published in printed form as a poem in 2008."}
{"text":"In 2010 Kay published \"Red Dust Road\", an account of her search for her biological parents, who had met each other when her father was a student at Aberdeen University and her mother was a nurse. The book was adapted for the stage by Tanika Gupta and premiered in August 2019 at the Edinburgh International Festival in a production by National Theatre of Scotland and HOME, at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh."}
{"text":"She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and Cultural Fellow at Glasgow Caledonian University. Kay lives in Manchester. She took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project \"Sixty-Six Books\", her piece being based on the book of Esther from the King James Bible. In October 2014, it was announced that she had been appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Salford, and that she would be the university's \"Writer in Residence\" from 1 January 2015."}
{"text":"In March 2016, Kay was announced as the next Scots Makar (national poet of Scotland), succeeding Liz Lochhead, whose tenure ended in January 2016."}
{"text":"She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours for services to literature, and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours, again for services to literature. Kay was on the list of the BBC's 100 Women announced on 23 November 2020."}
{"text":"Kay is a lesbian. In her twenties she gave birth to a son, Matthew (whose father is the writer Fred D'Aguiar) and later she had a 15-year relationship with poet Carol Ann Duffy. During this relationship, Duffy gave birth to a daughter, Ella, whose biological father is fellow poet Peter Benson."}
{"text":"Some other poetry used in GCSE Edexcel Syllabus"}
{"text":"Petronella Breinburg (1927 \u2013 5 November 2019) was a Surinamese British author, playwright and professor and one of the first black British authors to write picture books about black children. \"My Brother Sean\", illustrated by Errol Lloyd and published by The Bodley Head in 1973, was followed by a series, including \"Sean Goes to School\", \"Sean's Red Bike\" and \"Doctor Sean\". She also wrote books focused on older children, including her first book \"Legend of Suriname\", \"Us Boys of Westcroft\" and \"Stories from the Caribbean\". Her early books, published at a time where black authored books were rare, provided one of the first opportunities for black children in Britain to read stories they could identify with."}
{"text":"Breinburg, of mixed European and African heritage, was born in Suriname in 1931. Her father, a policeman, died when she was 12 and the family \u2013 there were six children \u2013 went to live with her grandmother, near an old Dutch plantation. This grandmother used to terrify the children with tales about the old Dutchman who had owned the plantation."}
{"text":"Influenced by a lineage of storytellers, Breinburg enjoyed writing from a young age, winning local competitions from age eight and writing her first play at 13. She was educated at St. Rosa and St. Margaret's Convent\u00a0in Suriname before training as a teacher. After emigrating to Guyana with her husband, she gave birth to two children. In Guyana, she was a member of the Red Cross Society for 10 years, serving for some time as Lieutenant of the Girls Life Brigade. She came to the UK with her two children to join her husband in 1961. Breinburg was a supply teacher in London, where her experience of racism and representation shaped her writing."}
{"text":"Breinburg obtained her doctorate in education with linguistics at University of Keele, with one year at Amsterdam University and a stint as a research fellow at the linguistic department of the University of Sheffield. She was then appointed to Goldsmiths' University of London, where she was a senior lecturer and head of the Caribbean Centre. Breinburg published books for children, teenagers, and for adults. She also wrote a number of plays and poetry."}
{"text":"Tamarind Books was a small independent British publisher specialising in picture books, fiction and non-fiction featuring black and Asian children and children with disabilities. It was founded by Verna Wilkins in 1987 with the mission of redressing the balance of diversity in children\u2019s publishing, and in 2007 became an imprint of Random House Children\u2019s Books UK."}
{"text":"Tamarind Books was founded by Grenada-born Verna Wilkins in 1987 after her five-year-old son came home from school with a \"This is Me\" booklet in which he had coloured himself pink. When she offered him a brown crayon to use instead, he refused, saying that the image he had drawn of himself had to have pink skin because it was for a book. When she researched the matter further, she arrived at the conclusion that her child and other children from the ethnic minorities were so under-represented in children\u2019s books that they were being denied an important stage in their learning, so she decided to start publishing books to meet that need."}
{"text":"For twenty years, Wilkins ran Tamarind Books from her home, writing many of the books herself, working with the support of her family and a small group of friends and freelancers. New books were published only when there was enough money in the company bank account. In the early years, she sold the books herself. Later Tamarind books were distributed by commercial distributors."}