Black History Month 2024
February is Black History Month - a celebration of the contributions/achievements African Americans have made in the United States.
"National African American History Month had its origins in 1915 when historian and author Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History...The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
This guide is also highlighting titles that showcase the Association for the Study of African American Life & History Black History Month 2024 Theme: African Americans and the Arts, as well as titles promoted for The National African American Month Read-In, the nation’s first and oldest event dedicated to diversity in literature established in 1990 by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English to make literacy a significant part of Black History Month.
- LUC: Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2024: "I Have a Dream" Imagining Session Join us at the upcoming “I Have a Dream” Imagining Sessions hosted by the Division of Student Development across all three campuses, open to all students, staff, and faculty! Together, we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic speech and share our visions for the next 60 years. At the Damen Cinema, all Ramblers will have an opportunity to hear Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
- Civil Rights: Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections This category encompasses the subjects of Civil Rights, Affirmative Action, Minorities, and Race. Some of the collections included here may only have 1 or 2 files on these subjects while other collections will have more information. Collections will be added to this list as they are uncovered at the Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections.
- Association for the Study of African American Life & History Black History Month 2024 Theme: African Americans and the Arts The Association for the Study of African American Life & History Black History Month Theme is Black Resistance. This theme is a call to everyone, inside and outside the academy, to study the history of Black Americans’ responses to establish safe spaces, where Black life can be sustained, fortified, and respected.
- African American History Month - The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Mus join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society.
- African American Literature Book Club the AALBC is a widely recognized source of author profiles, book and film reviews, book recommendations, event information, discussion forums, writer resources, interviews, articles, videos, and more.
- Association for the Study of African American Life and History "The mission of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH®) is to promote, research, preserve, interpret and disseminate information about Black life, history and culture to the global community."
- Library of Congress: African American History Month Images and Events "The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society."
- The National African American Read-In (NCTE) Celebrate Black History Month by taking part in the National African American Read-In. Sponsored by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and NCTE, and endorsed by the International Literacy Association, the goal is to document readers making the celebration of African American literacy a traditional part of Black History Month activities.
- National Civil Rights Museum The National Civil Rights Museum's... exhibits trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present.
- National Museum of African American History and Culture "The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture."
- National Park Service: African American Heritage Sites "America's national parks weave together a mosaic of African American history."
Local Exhibits/Museums
- Faith Ringgold: American People - Museum of Contemporary Art ChicagoExbibit dates: Nov 18, 2023 - Feb 25, 2024
- The Bronzeville Children's MuseumThe first and only African American children's museum in the country.
- The Black Chicago Museum Inc.The Black Chicago Museum Inc. is designed to educate, inspire and motivate individuals towards making this world a better place through sharing the history of African American people in Chicago, IL.
- South Side Community Art CenterFounded in 1940, the center continues to be a beacon for Black culture and a mecca for Black artists. SSCAC is the oldest African American art center in the United States and is a Chicago Historic Landmark.
Riffs and Relations by
A timely consideration of African-American artists' rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century, this book is the winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History. Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--explores the connections and frictions around modernism in the works of artists such as Romare Bearden, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold, Renee Cox, Robert Colescott, Norman Lewis, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems and Henri Matisse. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international and intergenerational connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.
ISBN: 9780847866649Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Exhibiting Blackness by
In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums?places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts. In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans?an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions?Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent.
Call Number: N510 .C67 2011 & onlineISBN: 9781558498754Publication Date: 2011-09-23
Racing the Great White Way by
The early drama of Eugene O'Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O'Neill's dramatic writing--changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O'Neill's texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater. In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O'Neill's plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because of the way these works stimulated traffic between Broadway and Harlem--and between white and Black America. These investigations of O'Neill and Broadway productions are enriched by the vibrant transnational exchange found in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9780472055784Publication Date: 2023-07-19
Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism by
In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls "tropical aesthetics"--using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists' identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.
Call Number: N6591 .N645 2021 & OnlineISBN: 9781478012894Publication Date: 2021-01-11
To Make Negro Literature by
In To Make Negro Literature Elizabeth McHenry traces African American authorship in the decade following the 1896 legalization of segregation. She shifts critical focus from the published texts of acclaimed writers to unfamiliar practitioners whose works reflect the unsettledness of African American letters in this period. Analyzing literary projects that were unpublished, unsuccessful, or only partially achieved, McHenry recovers a hidden genealogy of Black literature as having emerged tentatively, laboriously, and unevenly. She locates this history in books sold by subscription, in lists and bibliographies of African American authors and books assembled at the turn of the century, in the act of ghostwriting, and in manuscripts submitted to publishers for consideration and the letters of introduction that accompanied them. By attending to these sites and prioritizing overlooked archives, McHenry reveals a radically different literary landscape, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional.
Call Number: PS153.N5 M37 2021ISBN: 9781478014515Publication Date: 2021-10-22
The Artistic Activism of Elombe Brath by
In 1963, at the height of the southern civil rights movement, Cecil Brathwaite (1936-2014), under the pseudonym Cecil Elombe Brath, published a satire of Black leaders entitled Color Us Cullud! The American Negro Leadership Official Coloring Book. The book pillories a variety of Black leaders-from political figures like Adam Clayton Powell and Whitney Young to civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis, and even entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, and Dick Gregory-critiquing the inauthenticity of movement leaders while urging a more radical approach to Black activism. Despite the strong illustrations and unique commentary presented in the coloring book, it has virtually disappeared from histories of the movement. The Artistic Activism of Elombe Brath restores the coloring book and its creator to a place of prominence in the historiography of the Black left. It begins with an analysis of Brath's influences, describing his life and work including his development as a Black nationalist thinker and Black satirist. The volume includes Brath's early works-illustrations for DownBeat magazine and Beat Jokes, Bop Humor, & Cool Cartoons-as well as the full run of his comic strip "Congressman Carter and Beat Nick Jackson" from the New York Citizen-Call and a complete edition of Color Us Cullud! itself. These illustrations are followed by annotations that frame and contextualize each of the coloring book's entries. The book closes with selections from Brath's art and political thinking via archival material and samples of his written work. Ultimately, this volume captures and restores a unique perspective on the civil rights movement often omitted from the historiography but vital to understanding its full scope.
Call Number: E185.97.B812 A78 2021ISBN: 9781496835376Publication Date: 2021-09-30
The Meaning of Soul by
In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices--inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9781478012245Publication Date: 2020-07-24
South of Pico by
Named a Best Art Book of 2017 by the New York Times and Artforum In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond.
Call Number: N6538.N5 J668 2017ISBN: 9780822361459Publication Date: 2017-04-07
The Artist Portrait Series by
Fern Logan's collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. The Artist Portrait Series captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century. Each rich duotone portrait is accompanied by Logan's commentary on the artist. Logan began her career as a nature, landscape, and architectural photographer, but in 1983, resolving to put the human figure into her repertoire, she created the photodocumentary Artist Portrait Series. Her philosophy of art as an educational tool prompted her to document the accomplishments of such highly skilled visual artists as Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Roy DeCarava, and Romare Bearden. Logan expanded the project to promote recognition for prominent black artists in theater, television, film, music, dance, and literature, including Alvin Ailey, Maya Angelou, and Adolph Caesar. Her subjects include well-known artists as well as those who were emerging at the time they were photographed. For Logan, the artistic process is as important as the final image. Her portraits not only capture the personality of the sitter but also convey the dialogue and rapport between photographer and subject. Logan's interest in the tonal range of the black-and-white photograph and its contribution to the rich drama between light and dark informs her photographs in a formal manner. By allowing the artist/sitter to construct the photographic moment, Logan creates visually dynamic and psychologically probing images that are reinforced by the immediate studio or living environment. This elegant book documents nearly two decades of her finest portraits.
Call Number: TR681.A7 L635 2001ISBN: 0809323796Publication Date: 2001-06-20
Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists by
Over the last twenty years, numerous scholarly publications have treated the work of African American artists of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Detroit was the fifth largest city in the country with a large African American population and a vibrant Black arts scene. Nevertheless, the aforementioned publications fail to discuss Detroit African American artists. This book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same title, focuses on the life and work of Memphis born, Detroiter Harold Neal, who created some of the most forceful artistic statements of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. It also discusses other Detroit African American artists, including his predecessors Hughie Lee Smith and Oliver LaGrone, who greatly influenced his career; his contemporaries Glanton Dowdell, Charles McGee, Jon Onye Lockard, Henri Umbaji King, LeRoy Foster and Shirley Woodson, and his successors Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts and Allie McGhee, who were greatly impacted by his work. Additionally the book addresses the rift in the Detroit African American art community in the wake of the Black Power/Black Arts Movements. Neal, like other artists of the Black Arts Movement, felt that art should speak directly to the experience of African Americans using African American figurative subjects, while others artists, like Charles McGee, sought to compete in the white art world, working in the abstract, non-objective styles then dominant in New York galleries. The result of some ten years of research, this book presents a view of post-World War II African American art history essentially unknown to other scholars. It expands our understanding of Detroit African American art first set forth in the author's 2009 publication Energy: Charles McGee at Eighty Five. For this later project, Dr. Myers conducted extensive interviews with artists, scholars, friends and family members of the above mentioned artists. Most of their works remains in private collections, and Dr. Myers surveyed many of these, some in states outside of Michigan, in order to select the highest quality works for the exhibition. The book is based on hundreds of contemporary articles, published in Michigan Chronicle, Detroit's African American newspaper and in other local newspapers, as well as on other hard-to-locate archival materials. Dr. Myers assesses these Detroit artists in relation to their peers in other major metropolises such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles/San Francisco, thus establishing that Detroit artists were significant contributors to African American art in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Call Number: N6538.N5 M94 2020ISBN: 9780912042015Publication Date: 2020-12-08
New Negro Artists in Paris by
The New Negro Artist in Paris analyzes the experiences and works of six African American artists who lived and worked in Paris during the Jazz Age sculptors Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage, and painters Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and Albert Alexander Smith. More than 120 works of art are analyzed, many never before published. These artists exhibited the works they created in Paris at prestigious salons in France and in the United States, winning fellowships, grants, and awards. Leininger-Miller argues that it was study abroad that won these artists critical acclaim, establishing their reputations as some of the most significant leaders of the New Negro movement in the visual arts. She begins her study with a history of the debut of African American artists in Paris, 1830-1914, then provides readers with rarely seen profiles of each of the six artists from their birth through the end of their time abroad. Finally, Leininger-Miller examines patterns and differences in these individuals' backgrounds and development, their patronage in the United States and France, their shared experiences abroad, and the impact their study in Paris had on the rest of their careers.
Call Number: N6850 .L45 2001ISBN: 0813528119Publication Date: 2001-02-01
The Art of History : African American women artists engage the past by
"This important study is the first to confront head-on the avoidance of the visual that has plagued black studies in the United States. The Art of History opens the often hermetic world of black visual culture to a much broader realm in which questions central to contemporary feminism, black studies, and cultural theory are brought to bear."--Judith Wilson, University of California, Irvine "The Art of History is an important book that expands the significance of visual culture to African American studies debates. It provides cogent and insightful explorations of the work of contemporary African American women artists. Scholars and general readers alike are sure to be compelled by this original and innovative study."--Valerie Smith, author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings In this lively and engaging book, Lisa Gail Collins examines the work of contemporary African American women artists. Her study comes at a time when an unprecedented number of these artists--photographers, filmmakers, painters, installation and mixed-media artists--have garnered the attention and imagination of the art-viewing public. To better understand the significance of this particular historical moment in American visual arts, Collins focuses on four "problems" that recur when these artists confront their histories: the documentation of truth; the status of the black female body; the relationship between art and cultural contact and change; and the relationship between art and black girlhood. By examining the social and cultural histories which African American women artists engage, Collins illuminates a dialogue between past and present imagemakers. The Art of History is a major contribution to the study of American visual culture. It will be of use to both scholars and students in art history, African American studies, American studies, and women's studies.
Call Number: N6538.N5 C65 2002ISBN: 9780813530222Publication Date: 2002-03-01
Visualizing Equality by
The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.
Call Number: N6538.N5 G65 2020 & OnlineISBN: 9781469659961Publication Date: 2020-09-14
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer by Call Number: PS3539.O478 A17 1988 & OnlineISBN: 9781469616421Publication Date: 2014-06-24
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks by Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9781931082877Publication Date: 2005-11-17
Freedom Like Sunlight by Call Number: PS3562 .E9465 F74 2000ISBN: 1568461631Publication Date: 2000-08-01
Head off and Split by Call Number: Lewis Library Main Stacks PS3556.I53 H43 2011ISBN: 9780810152168Publication Date: 2011-01-27
The Rose That Grew from Concrete by Call Number: PS3569.H3234 R6 1999ISBN: 9780671028459Publication Date: 2009-02-03
The Vintage Book of African American Poetry by Call Number: PS591 .N4 V56 2000 & Online BookISBN: 0375703004Publication Date: 2000-02-15
No One Is Coming to Save Us by
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has grown distant, frustrated by the demise of the furniture industry, which has outsourced to China and stripped the area of jobs. Ava's mother, Sylvia, caters to and meddles with the lives of those around her, trying to fill the void left by her absent son. And Don, Sylvia's unworthy but charming husband, just won't stop hanging around. JJ's return—and his plans to build a huge mansion overlooking Pinewood and woo Ava—not only unsettles their family, but stirs up the entire town."--Jacket flap.
Call Number: PS3623.A887 N6 2017ISBN: 9780062472984Publication Date: 2017-04-04
Rest in Power by
Five years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin's name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child's death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade? Rest in Power, told through the compelling alternating narratives of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers, for the first time, those questions from the most intimate of sources. It's the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning.
Call Number: E185.97.M372 F85 2017ISBN: 9780812997231Publication Date: 2017-01-31
The Mother of Black Hollywood by
This 'Mega Diva' and costar of the hit sitcom black-ish bares her soul in this touching and poignant--and at times side-splittingly hilarious--memoir of a Midwestern girl with a dream, whose journey took her from poverty to the big screen, and along the way earned her many accolades.
Call Number: PN2287.L434 A3 2017ISBN: 9780062410405Publication Date: 2017-11-14
Red at the Bone by
"Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony -- a celebration that ultimately never took place"--Adapted from jacket.
Call Number: PS3573.O64524 R43 2019ISBN: 9780525535270Publication Date: 2019-09-17
A Sick Life by
As the lead singer of Grammy-winning supergroup TLC, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins has seen phenomenal fame, success, and critical acclaim. But backstage, she has lived a dual life. In addition to the balancing act of juggling an all-consuming music career and her family, Tionne has struggled since she was a young girl with sickle-cell disease, a debilitating and incurable condition that can render her unable to perform, walk, or even breathe.
Call Number: ML420.W265 A3 2017ISBN: 9781623368609Publication Date: 2017-09-12
I Almost Forgot about You by
Dr. Georgia Young's wonderful life--great friends, family, and successful career--aren't enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, quitting her job as an optometrist, and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love.
Call Number: PS3563.C3868 I53 2016ISBN: 9781101902578Publication Date: 2016-06-07
Hidden Figures by
"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens." -- Publisher's description
Call Number: QA27.5 .L44 2016ISBN: 9780062363596Publication Date: 2016-09-06
Sing, Unburied, Sing by
A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature"--
Living with his grandparents and sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his mother's addictions and his grandmother's cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
Call Number: PS3623.A7323 S56 2017ISBN: 9781501126079Publication Date: 2018-05-08
My Life, My Love, My Legacy by
"The life story of Coretta Scott King--wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular twentieth-century American civil rights activist--as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising black parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. One of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, a committed pacifist, and a civil rights activist, she was an avowed feminist--a graduate student determined to pursue her own career--when she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs and racial justice goals, she married King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, a marcher, a negotiator, and a crucial fundraiser in support of world-changing achievements. As a widow and single mother of four, while butting heads with the all-male African American leadership of the times, she championed gay rights and AIDS awareness, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, lobbied for fifteen years to help pass a bill establishing the US national holiday in honor of her slain husband, and was a powerful international presence, serving as a UN ambassador and playing a key role in Nelson Mandela's election. Coretta's is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an independent-minded black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful in the face of terrorism and violent hatred every single day of her life."--Provided by publisher.
Call Number: E185.97.K47 A3 2017ISBN: 9781627795982Publication Date: 2017-01-17
The Ballad of Black Tom by
"People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there. Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping. A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?"
Call Number: PS3562.A8458 B35 2016ISBN: 9780765387868Publication Date: 2016-02-16
When They Call You a Terrorist by
In 2013, when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, Patrisse's outrage led her to co-found Black Lives Matter with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin. Championing human rights in the face of violent racism, Patrisse is a survivor. She transformed her personal pain into political power, giving voice to a people suffering inequality and a movement fueled by her strength and love, to tell the country--and the world--that Black Lives Matter. [This book] is Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele's reflection on humanity. It is an empowering account of survival, strength and resilience and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent Black life expendable.
Call Number: E185.97.K43 A3 2018ISBN: 9781250171085Publication Date: 2018-01-16
Hunger by
Roxane Gay addresses the experience of living in a body that she calls 'wildly undisciplined.' She casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens, and twenties -- including the devastating act of violence that was a turning point at age 12 -- and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. With candor, vulnerability, and authority, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.
Call Number: BF697.5.B63 G39 2017ISBN: 9780062362599Publication Date: 2017-06-13
Old in Art School by
Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school--in her sixties--to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, "You will never be an artist"? Who defines what "An Artist" is and all that goes with such an identity?
Call Number: N6537.P23 A2 2018ISBN: 9781640090613Publication Date: 2018-06-19
Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography by Call Number: BP223 .Z8 L5745 2006ISBN: 9780809095049Publication Date: 2006-11-14
Incognegro a Graphic Mystery by Call Number: PN6727.J573 I53 2018ISBN: 9781506705644Publication Date: 2018-02-06
Kindred by Call Number: PS3552.U827 K51 2017 & Online BookISBN: 9781419709470Publication Date: 2017-01-10
I Am Alfonso Jones by Call Number: PZ7.7.M446 Iam 2017ISBN: 9781620142639Publication Date: 2017-10-15
Hip Hop Family Tree by Call Number: ML3531 .P57 2013ISBN: 9781606996904Publication Date: 2014-08-26The Hip Hop Family Tree is an encyclopedic comics history of the formative years of hip hop capturing the vivid personalities and magnetic performances of old-school pioneers and early stars.
Black Panther by Reginald Hudlin: the Complete Collection Vol. 1 by Call Number: PN6728.B519338 H83 2017ISBN: 9781302907716Publication Date: 2017-11-14
New Kid by
New Kid tells the story of Jordan, a twelve-year-old boy from New York City who's enrolled in a private school where he is one of only a few students of color. This is even more crushing for Jordan, as he secretly dreams to go to an art school. Jerry Craft's New Kid has become the first graphic novel to ever win the Newbery Medal at the 2020 Youth Media Awards in Philadelphia for being the "most distinguished contribution to American Literature for children." While other graphic novels have been considered for the medal in the past, New Kid had enough of an impact on young readers to clinch the esteemed title.
Call Number: Curriculum Collection (6th Floor) PZ7.7.C74 New 2019ISBN: 9780062691200Publication Date: 2019-02-05
Who Am I Without Him? by
Guys and girls get together, get played, and get real. Who Am I Without Him? is a Booklist Top 10 Romance Novel for Teens and is "breaking new and necessary ground" in 12 short stories about guys and girls falling in and out of love and relationships, testing out ways to communicate with one another, respect each other - and respect themselves. This is a complex, often humorous, and always on-point exploration of today's teens determined to find love and self-worth...any way they know how.
Call Number: PS3556 .L287 W46 2004Publication Date: 2004-05-01
Revolution by
It's 1964 in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Sunny's town is being invaded by people from up north who are coming to help people register to vote. Her personal life isn't much better, as a new stepmother, brother, and sister are crowding into her life, giving her little room to breathe.
Call Number: PZ7.W6474 Re 2014Publication Date: 2014-05-27
Chasing Space Young Readers' Edition by
Leland Melvin is the only person in human history to catch a pass in the National Football League and in space. Though his path to the heavens was riddled with setbacks and injury, Leland persevered to reach the stars.
Call Number: TL789.85.M46 A3 2017bPublication Date: 2017-05-23
Streaming Videos/Films
Kanopy: Black History Month Collection
Cite Black Authors
- Cite Black AuthorsWe seek to enhance the recognition and citation of black academic voices. Our approach requires a shift from traditional citation practices that are passive and white-centric to active citation practices that both quantify and equilibrate racial representation.