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Books to Celebrate Juneteenth |
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Everybody's protest novel : essays
by James Baldwin
This collectible edition celebrates James Baldwin's 100th-year anniversary, probing the shortcomings of the American protest novel and the harmful representations of Black identity in film and fiction. Originally published in Notes of a Native Son, the essays "Autobiographical Notes," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Carmen Jones: The Dark is Light Enough," showcase Baldwin's incisive voice as a social and literary critic. "Autobiographical Notes" outlines Baldwin's journey as a Black writer and his hesitant transition from fiction to nonfiction. In the following essays, Baldwin explores the Black experience through the lens of popular media, critiquing the ways in which Black characters--in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Richard Wright's novel Native Son, and the 1950s film Carmen Jones--are reduced to digestible caricatures. Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays is the first of 3 special editions in the James Baldwin centennial anniversary series. Through this collection, Baldwin examines the facade of progress present in the novels of Black oppression. These essays showcase Baldwin's profound ability to reveal the truth of the Black experience, exposing the failure of the protest novel, and the state of racial reckoning at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.
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Of greed and glory : in pursuit of freedom for all
by Deborah G. Plant
"A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America's obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times-bestselling Barracoon. Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American's personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans-including author Deborah Plant's brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on the history of slavery in America-are deprived of these basic freedoms every day. In her studies of Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah Plant became fascinated by Hurston's explanation for the atrocities of the international slave trade. In her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston wrote: "But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory." We look the other way when the basic human rights of marginalized and stigmatized groups are violated and desecrated, not realizing that only the practice of justice everywhere secures justice, for any of us, anywhere. An active vigilance is required of those who would be and remain free; with Of Greed and Glory, Deborah Plant reveals the many ways in which slavery continues in America today and charts our collective course toward personal sovereignty for all."
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Jubilee
by Margaret Walker
A novel based on the life of the author's great-grandmother follows the story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, through the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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James : a novel
by Percival Everett
Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.
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On Juneteenth
by Annette Gordon-Reed
In this intricately woven tapestry of American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us.
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We refuse : a forceful history of Black resistance
by Kellie Carter Jackson
Offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women, a noted historian presents a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience and a path toward liberation.
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Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave
by Frederick Douglass
In addition to the classic African American autobiography and American slave narrative, this edition also includes Frederick Douglass's speech“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” and his only known work of fiction, The Heroic Slave.
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Freedom season : how 1963 transformed America's civil rights revolution
by Peniel E. Joseph
"In Freedom Season, acclaimed historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle--a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed. Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. Freedom Season shows how the upheavals of 1963 planted the seeds for watershed civil rights legislation and renewed hope in the promise and possibility of freedom."
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Juneteenth : a novel
by Ralph Ellison
Shot on the Senate floor by a young black man, a dying racist senator summons an elderly black Baptist minister from Oklahoma to his side for a remarkable dialogue that reveals the deeply buried secrets of their shared past and the tragedy that reunites them. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.
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Happy land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
When Nikki visits her estranged grandmother in North Carolina, she uncovers a hidden legacy tied to a forgotten kingdom of freed people, unraveling her family's secrets and her own identity while fighting to protect their endangered heritage.
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The American daughters : a novel
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Ady, when she's separated from her mother, meets Lenore, a free black woman who invites her to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters, setting her on a journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.
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River of blood : American slavery from the people who lived it
by Richard Cahan
An updated edition of the Slave Narratives, collected in the 1930s by the federal government’s Works Progress Administration, incorporates hundreds of photographs that were omitted from the original interviews documenting the slave experience before and during the American Civil War. (United States history). Illustrations.
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Wake : the hidden history of women-led slave revolts
by Rebecca Hall
Part graphic novel, part memoir, this book, using in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, tells the story of women-led slave revolts, uncovering the truth about these women warriors, who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Illustrations.
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