by Nafeesah Allen June 7, 2020 Memoir is a great genre to re-discover Black histories. This text by Harlem fashion legend "Dapper Dan" (Daniel Day) reviews his Harlem life from tenements as a child to throwing dice in the 1970s to selling iconic fashion designs to...
by Nafeesah Allen June 7, 2020 Civil rights activist Michelle Alexander looked into the history of mass incarceration in the U.S. and traced its roots back to the Jim Crow era. She argues that there has been a "racial caste system" in the U.S., which has created a...
by Nafeesah Allen June 7, 2020 This historic book by Beverly Daniel Tatum offers insights into the process of community making among Black and African-Americans in predominantly White spaces. It raises issues about how the integration of schools and previously...
by Nafeesah Allen June 7, 2020 In 1927, anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is a wealth of knowledge about Black life in the early 1900s. Interviewed in Alabama, eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis told Hurston about his experience as an enslaved...
by Nafeesah Allen July 1, 2020 The book presents the history of the first African American Roman Catholic sisterhood in the United States. The Oblate Sisters of Providence was founded in Baltimore in 1828. It became a religious beacon for Black and African-American...
by Nafeesah Allen July 5, 2020 Historian Manning Marable's (May 1950 – April 2011) book analyzes different leadership models and uses case studies from 19th and 20th-century Black history to present arguments for and against each. Tackling accommodation (Booker T....
by Nafeesah Allen June 7, 2020 Vivek Bald's groundbreaking work about the socio-economic integration of Bengali and Muslim South Asian immigrants into Black communities in the U.S. is an unprecedently well-researched and delicately written history of Black and Brown...
The common narrative of slavery in America revolves around enslaved Africans being transported via cargo ships from West Africa to the American south and then sold to wealthy white landowners. While this narrative bears some truth, it ignores the variations of slavery...
Book Review by Marina Davis In the summer of 1964, three men were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for their work registering African Americans to vote. Organizing peaceful protests against the violence and mistreatment of African Americans in Mississippi...
Rarely does a book stump me, but this one has done it. I have had it on my shelf for months and could only bring myself to read just one or two pages at a time. It is not because the book is a hard read, but because it is so dense and so descriptive that it feels too...
This book, like all of them by Zora Neale Hurston, is one of my absolute favorites. Hurston was an anthropologist from my alma mater (Barnard in NYC whoop whoop!) and she was trained under Franz Boas in the 1920s. This work is a solid representation of her oral...
What do Kunta Kinte, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman have in common? Their geographies truly connect them across the Americas - from the African continent to the shores of Maryland (Annapolis, Talbot County, and Dorchester County, respectively). This brief...
This brief photobook was clearly produced by local talent and Baltimore insiders, who are rare gems for history buffs. This is an easy read, mainly because it is so image heavy, but it also sheds light on easier and brighter times for Charm City. It focuses on...
You might think you know a little something, something about the Black Literati of the Harlem Rennaissance but - trust me - you don't know the half. This historical review of the letters (drafted, mailed, and published) between literary giants Zora Neale Hurston and...
I received the first edition of this book as a high school graduation prize and the word "Africana" has followed me ever since. As an Africana Studies major in university and a migration scholar thereafter, I have relied on and referred to this book many times over...
Book Review by Marina Davis This is an essay collection meant to explore racial identity and interactions and overlaps between major minority groups mainly Latinos, Afro-Latinos, and Black people. The essays are organized into three parts, Comparative Racialization in...
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