Black History Month: Focus on: Men

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men's ability to make good and forgive themselves--and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

The fatherless black family is a problem that increases in proportion each year as generations of black children grow up without an adult male in the home. This work presents a personal examination of black fatherhood. This tale of black men tells the stories of extraordinary men who strive to become something they have never known.

Traces the development of African-American community traditions over three centuries. From the subaltern assemblies of the enslaved in colonial New York City to the benevolent New York African Society of the early national era to the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in twentieth century Harlem, voluntary associations have been a fixture of African-American communities.

This book examines constructions of masculinity among men in the informal economy of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. It demonstrates how French colonial legacies and global media representations of Blackness anchor identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth. Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights.

Every Supreme Court transition presents an opportunity for a shift in the balance of the third branch of American government, but the replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas in 1991 proved particularly momentous. Not only did it shift the ideological balance on the Court; it was inextricably entangled with the persistent American dilemma of race. In The Transition, this most significant transition is explored through the lives and writings of the first two African American justices on Court, touching on the lasting consequences for understandings of American citizenship as well as the central currents of Black political thought over the past century. In their lives, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas experienced the challenge of living and learning in a world that had enslaved their relatives and that continued to subjugate members of their racial group.

The Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Jackson remains one of the most important but least known figures of twentieth-century African American Christian history. In this book, Jared E. Alcántara sets out a definitive academic biography of this complex figure.

This authoritative biography of civil rights giant John Lewis draws on more than forty archives, untapped private papers, and interviews with Lewis and 250 people who knew him, including Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Only Martin Luther King Jr. contributed more to the civil rights movement of the 1960s than John Lewis. He was a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a Freedom Rider who integrated bus stations in the South, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during its heyday. His vicious beating by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, galvanized political opinion to pass the historic Voting Rights Act.

On the heels of his historic election to the United States Senate, Raphael Warnock shares his remarkable spiritual and personal journey. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock occupies a singular place in American life. As Senior Pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church and now as a Senator from Georgia, he is the rare voice who can at once call out the uncomfortable truths that shape contemporary American life and, at a time of division, summon us all to a higher moral ground.

Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories -- our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking -- expose and distort our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist -- and named for a Nubian pharaoh -- Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the "steampunk" city of "old traditions and new machinery," meeting with strangers and dining with local writers who quiz him in French about African American politics.