Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who "slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives." A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, Álvarez struggled to fit in. At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group of Dené, Secwépemc, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Apache, Tohono O'odham, Seri, Purépecha, and Maya runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories alongside his own, Álvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala that pushed him to his limits. He writes not only of overcoming hunger, thirst, and fear--dangers included stone-throwing motorists and a mountain lion--but also of asserting Indigenous and working-class humanity in a capitalist society where oil extraction, deforestation, and substance abuse wreck communities. Running through mountains, deserts, and cities, and through the Mexican territory his parents left behind, Álvarez forges a new relationship with the land, and with the act of running, carrying with him the knowledge of his parents' migration, and--against all odds in a society that exploits his body and rejects his spirit--the dream of a liberated future.
Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Genesis of White Power and Wealth tells the story of how Black lives and labor created White power and wealth in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and other fields. Through the lives of individual Black men and women a deeper understanding unravels of the role Blacks played, directly and indirectly, in creating American institutions of power and wealth-while never allowed full participation. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets. Of Blood and Sweat depicts this struggle from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America and a consistent theme emerges: Trace the history of almost any major American institution of power and wealth and you'll find it was created by Black Americans, or created to control them. Painstakingly researched, and comprehensively documented, Of Blood and Sweat is a compelling look at the past with broad implications for present-day calls for racial equity, racial justice, and the abolishment of systemic racism.
Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed to the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Along the way, they gathered memories from some of the last living witnesses for whom the Green Book meant survival--remarkable people who not only endured but rose above the hate, building vibrant Black communities against incredible odds. Driving the Green Book is a vital work of national history as well as a hopeful chronicle of Black resilience and resistance.
An incisive and illuminating analysis of the enduring legacy of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction--a comprehensive story of Black Americans' struggle for human rights and dignity and the failure of the nation to fulfill its promises of freedom, citizenship, and justice.
According to conventional wisdom, American women's campaign for the vote began with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The movement was led by storied figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But this women's movement was an overwhelmingly white one, and it secured the constitutional right to vote for white women, not for all women. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha Jones offers a sweeping history of African American women's political lives in America, recounting how they fought for, won, and used the right to the ballot and how they fought against both racism and sexism. From 1830s Boston to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and beyond to Shirley Chisholm, Stacey Abrams, and Kamala Harris, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women who, although in many cases suffragists, were never single-issue activists. She recounts the lives of Maria Stewart, the first American woman to speak about politics before a mixed audience of men and women African Methodist Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee Reconstruction-era advocate for female suffrage Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Boston abolitionist, religious leader, and women's club organizer Eliza Ann Gardner, and other hidden figures who were pioneers for both gender and racial equality. Revealing the ways black women remained independent in their ideas and their organization, Jones shows how black women were again and again the American vanguard of women's rights, setting the pace in the quest for justice and collective liberation. In the twenty-first century, black women's power at the polls and in politics is evident. Vanguard reveals that this power is not at all new, but is instead the culmination of two centuries of dramatic struggle.
The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights , acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s—particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act—to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama. Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements. Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world.
Klinenberg "makes the provocative case that the future of democratic societies rests not only on shared values but also on shared 'social infrastructure': the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, coffee shops, pools, and parks that promote crucial, sometimes life-saving connections between people who might otherwise fail to find common cause.
Nicholas Kristof grew up in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. These accounts provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes.
We Chose Colorado is a compelling collection of oral histories voiced by over 40 persons of Japanese birth or heritage who now reside in Colorado. They include the histories of original immigrants (Issei) who left Japan prior to World War II, doing so for a variety of reasons, including recruitment by US railroad companies as laborers, by mining companies as miners, or to pursue farm work. Those histories are narratives of ambition, struggle, and success. Members of the second generation (Nisei) pursued educations and economic advancement for themselves and their families. But the histories also tell of setbacks as American citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated in concentration camps by the US government during World War II. Following the war, however, Japanese Americans were able to rebuild their lives and to become once again valuable contributors to Colorado through the introduction of more-efficient farming methods, sushi, sake, ikebana, martial arts, karaoke and more. Dr. Joyce Lebra provides valuable context and analysis of these fascinating accounts through an overview of the history of the Japanese presence in America generally and in Colorado specifically, enabling the reader to understand more readily and to appreciate more deeply the experiences of persons of Japanese birth or descent residing in America.
The 21st volume in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series, Before Whiteness is a searing indictment of anti-Black social and political violence by British-Jamaican poet and leading scholar of Afropessimism D.S. Marriott. A book that turns Blackness into a question of reading, seeking to at once destroy and reimagine the various traditions of inscribing and decoding Blackness in poetry, Before Whiteness draws on a sweeping range of cultural references from 19th century German Romantic poet/philosopher Hölderlin to contemporary UK grime rapper Stormzy. Born in Britain but now living in the U.S., Marriott trains his analytical gaze on such grim American subject matter as the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade and the lynching of Melby Dotson in Louisana, yet also finds inspiration in African American poets Stephen Jonas and Bob Kaufman and the artist Kara Walker. Other works find him celebrating fallen poetic comrades like Sean Bonney and Dambudzo Marechera. The book ends with "Another Burning," an ambitious and agonized memorialization of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where an out-of-control fire spread throughout a high-rise building of council flats due to neglect and unsafe materials, resulting in the deaths of 72 poor, largely ethnic minority residents. "Another Burning" is both a mournful elegy for the victims and a stirring rebuke of the structural racism of contemporary UK society that allowed such a preventable and even forewarned-of tragedy to occur. With its necessarily critical transatlantic perspective, Before Whiteness provides poetic resistance to the injustices experienced by people of color in the postcolonial Anglophone world.
Nationally renowned journalist and award-winning author Roland Martin has been sounding this alarm for more than a decade. In White Fear, he provides a primer on how white fear has shaped, and continues to shape, our democracy and our culture.
An anthology of collective stories, testimonials, and incantations to guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice.
After an abusive, neglected childhood spent on welfare and in and out of homelessness in Alaska, raised by a mother who believed she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging with a bunch of straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and find her food by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still, the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood continued to haunt her. The Sunset Route is a powerful and brazingly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States.
A tragedy is unfolding all around us and is receiving well overdue attention. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy than their white peers. But Dr. Monique Rainford is working to better understand these disparities and do something about them. Pregnant While Black is a hopeful exploration of the issues pregnant Black women face in America. Within these pages, Dr. Rainford draws on over twenty years of experience working in obstetrics and gynecology to offer a primer on Black pregnancies and how to better care for them. She shares the successes and testimonies of Black women who have struggled during pregnancy and childbirth, anchoring the stories of these women with carefully researched facts. Despite medical advances over the last twenty years, for Black women, the overwhelming dangers of carrying and delivering children remain and it only seems to be getting worse. In Pregnant While Black, Rainford begins the work of "repairing the damage of the past" with an examination of the conditions that plague Black pregnancies. This important book carries the hopes and dreams of a generation looking to effect change, here and now.
At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde.
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the South to the North.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods.
The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight. Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers. Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.
The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the many dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression. Enlivened by Sorin's personal history, Driving While Black opens an entirely new view onto the African American experience, and shows why travel was so central to the Civil Rights movement.
Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West: First in Line for the Rio Grande is a chronicle of drought and water shortages throughout the rapidly growing American West, where long-established agricultural water rights play an increasingly critical role in problematic attempts to satisfy agricultural and urban needs in the region
Traces the lives of twenty-two immigrant teens throughout the course of a year at Denver's South High School who attended a specially created English Language Acquisition class and who were helped to adapt through strategic introductions to American culture.
Providing the most comprehensive examination to date of Asians in the Centennial State, William Wei addresses a wide range of experiences, from anti-Chinese riots in late nineteenth-century Denver to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Amache concentration camp to the more recent influx of Southeast Asian refugees and South Asian tech professionals. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Wei reconstructs what life was like for the early Chinese and Japanese pioneers, and he pays special attention to the different challenges faced by those in urban versus rural areas. The result is a groundbreaking approach that helps us better understand how Asians survived―and thrived―in an often hostile environment.
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago--'one day, you'll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.' Javier's adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone except for a group of strangers and a "coyote" hired to lead them to safety, Javier's trip is supposed to last two short weeks. At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents' arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito not only provides an immediate and intimate account of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier's story, but it's also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.