Black History Month

Black History Suggestions from our Richland Library

Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf
Lane Demas

This groundbreaking history of African Americans and golf explores the role of race, class, and public space in golf course development, the stories of individual black golfers during the age of segregation, the legal battle to integrate public golf courses, and the little-known history of the United Golfers Association (UGA) – a black golf tour that operated from 1925-1975. Lane Demas charts how African Americans nationwide organized social campaigns, filed lawsuits, and went to jail in order to desegregate courses; he also provides little-known, dramatic stories of golfers who boldly confronted wider segregation more broadly in their local communities. As national civil rights organizations debated golf’s symbolism and whether or not to pursue the game’s integration, black players and caddies took matters into their own hands and helped shape its subculture, while UGA participants forged one of the most durable black sporting organizations in American history as they fought to join the white Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA). From George F. Grant’s invention of the golf tee in 1899, to the dominance of superstar Tiger Woods in the 1990s, this accessible and comprehensive work challenges stereotypes and indeed the fundamental story of race and golf in American culture.

Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism
Jelani M. Favors

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism. Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten “second curriculum” at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.

The African American Sonnet: A Literary History
Timo Müller

Some of the most famous African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “First fight. Then fiddle.” Few readers realize that these poems come from a rich tradition of more than a thousand sonnets written by African American poets over a century and a half. The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research, the study demonstrates that closer attention to the sonnet modifies our understanding of key developments in African American literary history. Each chapter addresses such a development: the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the post-war period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and the disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry. Throughout this rich history, the study argues, sonnets have been “troubling spaces” in more ways than one. The sonnet became a contested space when black poets appropriated the “scanty plot of ground” (Wordsworth) from which they had long been excluded. The sonnets written by these poets troubled the material and discursive boundaries African Americans have been facing in a society organized around racial inequality. The confrontation and subversion of boundaries is inscribed into the very structure of the sonnet, which made it a preferred testing ground for such strategies in the literary realm.

From Kanopy

A Feast For the Eyes, Ears, And Heart, March 26, 2001 Reviewer: Angela Jefferson (see more about me) from Memphis, Tn USA In the opening of her film, Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash alerts the viewer that this is no ordinary African American story. Conversely, this is an American history lesson with African origins. A small informative note at the start of the film puts the entire movie in context. Without this explanatory foreword, many viewers would probably find the film hard to understand. Though the movie tells the story of the Peazant family’s migration from the sea islands of the South, the story also gives a panoramic view of the Gullah culture at-large. Because the islands are isolated from the mainland states, the Gullah retain a distinct African ethnicity and culture. Ironically, the Peazants want to rid themselves of the old ways and heritage, thus beginning an exodus from the islands to the mainland.

Through a Lens Darkly

The first documentary to explore the American family photo album through the eyes of black photographers, Through a Lens Darkly probes the recesses of American history to discover images that have been suppressed, forgotten and lost. From slavery to the present, these extraordinary images unveil a world confronting the difficult edges of citizenship and what it means to be human. Inspired by Deborah Willis’s book Reflections in Black and featuring works by Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Anthony Barboza, Hank Willis Thomas and many others, Through a Lens Darkly introduces the viewer to a community of storytellers who collectively transform singular experiences into a journey of discovery—and a call to action.

Check this out – The cooking gene : a journey through African American culinary history in the Old South
Twitty, Michael

Available at Kitty Lindsay Learning Resources Center Book Stacks (E185.89.F66 T95 2017).