Black History Month Blog

2010-02-04T03:45:00.000-08:00

Black History Month celebrates the work of Americans such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Barack Obama, Sojourner Truth, Marian Anderson and Jackie Robinson

One of the first successful challenges to segregation came in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 when teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white woman and, for the first time in the city’s history, fought the charges in court.

Until the civil rights movement, most American blacks could get a college education only from historically black colleges and universities. Shown here is writer Alice Walker, who attended Spelman College in Atlanta.

Read more at: http://www.america.gov/amlife/people.html

- Learn about the contributions of significant but less-prominent African Americans. Readers suggest future chapter......s to grow this Living Book.

- Photo Gallery: Historically Black Colleges and Universitieshttp://www.america.gov/multimedia/photogallery.html#/4110/hbcu/

- Photo Gallery: The U.S. Civil Rights Movementhttp://www.america.gov/multimedia/photogallery.html#/39/civil_rights_07/

- Photo Gallery: Historically Black Colleges and Universitieshttp://www.america.gov/multimedia/photogallery.html#/4110/hbcu/

- Photo Gallery: Black Economic Empowerment in Americahttp://www.america.gov/multimedia/photogallery.html#/30145/black_econ/

Michelle Obama: A Woman of Influence http://www.america.gov/michelle_obama.html

2009-12-09T07:15:00.000-08:00

First lady Michelle Obama serves as a role model for women who strive to balance their professional careers and their roles as mothers and wives.

Washington — When Michelle Obama becomes first lady of the United States on January 20, she will join her husband in a partnership widely expected to transform the public face America presents to the world. In the process, she will assume a new role that offers exciting opportunities and challenges.

Read More at:
http://www.america.gov/michelle_obama.html

Michelle Obama Defines Own Role as First Lady

Michelle Obama: A Woman of Influence

Michelle Obama Presents Modern Image for Black Women

Meet the Obama Family

Public service

2009-01-26T07:11:00.000-08:00

Posted by Khoi Dac Vo on January 23, 2009 at 02:54 AM (UTC)

Obama told Cabinet members and senior staff at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

"It's not about advantaging yourself. It's not about advancing your friends or your corporate clients. It's not about advancing an ideological agenda or the special interests of any organization,"

..."Public service is, simply and absolutely, about advancing the interests of Americans."

FREE AT LAST: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement

2009-01-13T00:55:00.000-08:00

Full Book in PDF Format:

http://www.america.gov/media/pdf/books/free-at-last.pdf#popup

This book recounts how African-American slaves and their descendants struggled to win — both in law and in practice — the civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. It is a story of dignified persistence and struggle, a story that produced great heroes and heroines, and one that ultimately succeeded by forcing Americans to confront squarely the shameful gap between their universal principles of equality and justice and the inequality, injustice, and oppression faced by millions of their fellow citizens.
http://www.america.gov/publications/books.html

Also read & add Comments

BARACK OBAMA: 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

2009-01-06T05:19:00.000-08:00

Photo: Courtesy FP Magazine Cover January 2009
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=220

BARACK OBAMA’S VICTORY SPEECH
America.gov
EN: http://www.america.gov/st/elections08-english/2008/November/20081105101958abretnuh0.580044.html?CP.rss=true
AR: http://www.america.gov/st/elections08-arabic/2008/November/20081105151948bsibhew0.672909.html

BARACK OBAMA BIOGRAPHY
Biographical info from America.gov http://uspolitics.america.gov/uspolitics/elections/candidates.html#11
Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress entry
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=O000167

BARACK OBAMA: 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
America.gov
EN: http://www.america.gov/media/pdf/books/obamaen.pdf (10 pages)
AR: http://www.america.gov/ar/media/pdf/books/obama.pdf (10 pages)

Barack Obama, elected the 44th President of the United States, has lived a truly American life, and has opened a new chapter in American politics. This publication tells the story of Obama’s life, describes how he captured the presidency, and portrays his vision for the future. It also introduces readers to the Obama family and to the new Vice President, Joseph Biden.

OBAMA
November 2008, Special Edition Oxford Analytica
The Political Economist.com http://www.thepoliticaleconomist.com/resources/ThePoliticalEconomist2008-11.pdf

PRESIDENT OBAMA
A HISTORIC ELECTION ON THE WORLD’S FRONT PAGES
Images of front pages from many newspapers worldwide, the day after the November 4 U.S. election http://www.poynterextra.org/gallery/frontpages.html

THE JOSHUA GENERATION

2009-01-06T05:06:00.001-08:00

A Reporter at Large
The Joshua Generation
Race and the campaign of Barack Obama.
by David Remnick November 17, 2008

Full Article at:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_remnick?printable=true

Speaking at a church in Selma, Obama was not a patriarch and not a prophet but the prophesied. “I’m here because somebody marched,” he said. “I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”

Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

Obama Wins Historic Presidential Nomination

2008-06-04T02:17:00.001-07:00

Becomes First Black Candidate To Head Major-Party Ticket
Barak Obama Website:http://www.barackobama.com/index.php
Obama Claims Nomination

By Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 4, 2008; A01
With a split decision in the final two primaries and a flurry of superdelegate endorsements, Sen. Barack Obama sealed the Democratic presidential nomination last night after a grueling and history-making campaign against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that will make him the first African American to head a major-party ticket. Before a chanting and cheering audience in St. Paul, Minn., the first-term senator from Illinois savored what once seemed an unlikely outcome to the Democratic race with a nod to the marathon that was ending and to what will be another hard-fought battle, against Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. "Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another -- a journey that will bring a new and better day to America," he said, as the emotion of the moment showed on his face. "Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America." Obama's success marked a major milestone for the nation -- a sign of the racial progress that has taken place during the span of the senator's lifetime. But the nomination battle also revealed a racial schism within the Democratic Party, and potential resistance to a black candidate in some parts of the country that will play out in the general-election campaign. Obama's victory was notable not simply for its historic importance but also because it marked a rejection, albeit by the narrowest of margins, of a candidate who represented the most powerful family in Democratic politics. Clinton's defeat seemed almost inconceivable a year ago as the race was beginning to unfold, but Obama and his advisers proved equal to the challenge. In the last two primaries, Obama won Montana but lost to Clinton in South Dakota, a continuation of the seesaw battle the two waged from the first caucuses in Iowa in January through more than 50 other contests. They fought the most closely contested Democratic nomination battle in the modern era and split the party into two almost equal coalitions. But with the help of superdelegates who declared their allegiance to Obama throughout the day, he easily crossed the threshold of 2,118 delegates needed to secure the nomination around the time polls had closed in Montana and South Dakota, closing off the last slender hope Clinton had to take away the nomination. During his speech, Obama offered praise to his rival. "She has made history not just because she's a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she is a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight," he said. Obama still faces a sizable job of uniting his party, and his uneven performance during the final months of the nomination battle could make Clinton's supporters more difficult to win over quickly. Clinton has pledged to help unify the part, but last night she signaled that she will do so on her own timetable. Clinton, who waged a fierce campaign to become the first woman nominated for the presidency, spoke shortly before Obama at a rally in New York. Amid questions about when or whether she would quit the race, she declared: "This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight." Earlier in the day, she opened the door to considering to be Obama's vice presidential running mate, should he make the offer, leading to speculation about what her goals will be. "You know, I understand that that a lot of people are asking, 'What does Hillary want? What does she want?' " she said. She then ticked off a list that included ending the war in Iraq, improving the economy and providing universal health care. But in a clear statement aimed at Obama, she added: "I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard and no longer to be invisible." Obama spoke at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, the arena where McCain will accept the Republican nomination in September, and he used much of his speech to cast McCain as a continuation of the Bush presidency. But before Obama took the stage in Minnesota, McCain was on television from New Orleans with a speech that challenged the Democrat in an outline of the debate that will take place between now and November. "This is, indeed, a change election," McCain said. "No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically. But the choice is between the right change and the wrong change, between going forward and going backward." The last day of the primary-caucus season provided a fitting conclusion to the long nomination battle, a day of extraordinary drama, frenzied speculation and fast-changing events. Obama's campaign worked furiously to pressure uncommitted superdelegates to endorse him, Clinton's campaign struggled to provide her with time to leave the race on her own terms, and the media breathlessly sought to keep pace. Yesterday began with an unexpected report by the Associated Press that said Clinton would use her rally last night to concede. Campaign chairman Terence R. McAuliffe immediately went on CNN to deny the report, and a short time later the campaign issued a terse statement: "The AP story is incorrect. Sen. Clinton will not concede the nomination this evening." But inside the campaign there was confusion as aides struggled to figure out what had triggered the report, and expressed uncertainty about the day ahead. "This is very much a work in progress," a senior Clinton adviser said. Clinton fought a rear-guard action, with her campaign officials pleading with superdelegates and party leaders to give her the dignity of a graceful exit and an election-night rally in which she could celebrate her long campaign rather than concede to her rival. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid had exhorted a group of uncommitted senators on Monday to hold off their declarations until today, and he repeated that plea publicly yesterday. "Senator Clinton needs to be left alone. . . . Let this week work its course," he told reporters at the Capitol. The only remaining question was when -- not whether -- Clinton would step aside. Some advisers, including former chief strategist Mark Penn, reportedly urged her to consider the full range of options, other than quitting outright. Others counseled her to consider her options -- and her legacy. Aides said the end is likely to come by week's end but could be signaled as soon as today. Talk of a possible Clinton vice presidency came out of a discussion she held with supporters in the New York congressional delegation. Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez (D-N.Y.), told The Washington Post that she had implored Clinton to think about the passionate support her candidacy has received from Latino voters, who will be crucial to Democratic chances in November. "She said if she was asked, she would consider it," Velazquez said. "She said, 'Look, I will do whatever it takes to defeat McCain in November.' " Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 after eight years in the Illinois Senate, the 46-year-old Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, accomplished something that few thought possible when he began his candidacy in February 2007 against the heavily favored Clinton. Clinton, the former first lady and a second-term senator from New York, seemingly held all the advantages, including a vast network of fundraisers, a web of political supporters in virtually every state, and the allure of being able to restore to power a family that had given the Democrats control of the White House for eight years under her husband. Obama proved to be an even more prodigious fundraiser, tapping the Internet as no candidate ever had to raise millions more than his rival, and also grabbed hold of a powerful movement of grass-roots supporters and volunteers who helped fuel his candidacy and provided a built-in base of organization across the country. He also tapped effectively into a hunger for change after eight years of the Bush administration. In a Democratic campaign that, initially at least, was cast as experience vs. change, Obama proved to have found the more powerful message. Obama's victory -- and Clinton's unexpected third-place finish -- in the Iowa caucuses in January upended expectations for the nomination battle and set the candidates on an epic struggle that continued until the polls closed last night. With an 11-contest winning streak in mid-February, Obama built what turned out to be an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, then held on in the campaign's last three months as Clinton ticked off victories in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana. Meanwhile, Obama effectively turned the tables on Clinton among the party leaders and elected officials who make up the nearly 800 superdelegates. After Clinton built a substantial lead among that group in the early stages of the race, Obama steadily gained ground and then surged ahead with these party insiders. Once that began, Clinton's hopes of winning the nomination effectively came to an end. Kornblut reported from New York. Staff writers Shailagh Murray, Paul Kane and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report

Obama Clinches Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket

2008-06-04T02:11:00.001-07:00

June 4, 2008
Obama Clinches Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket
By JEFF ZELENY
Senator Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday evening, prevailing through an epic battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in a primary campaign that inspired millions of voters from every corner of America to demand change in Washington.
A last-minute rush of Democratic superdelegates, as well as the results from the final primaries, in Montana and South Dakota, pushed Mr. Obama over the threshold of winning the 2,118 delegates needed to be nominated at the party’s convention in August. The victory for Mr. Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, broke racial barriers and represented a remarkable rise for a man who just four years ago served in the Illinois Senate.
“Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” Mr. Obama told supporters at a rally in St. Paul. “Because of you, tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America.”
In a speech to supporters in New York City, Mrs. Clinton paid tribute to Mr. Obama, but she did not leave the race. In a speech more defiant than conciliatory, she again presented her case that she was the stronger candidate and argued that she had won the popular vote, a notion disputed by the Obama campaign.
“I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected,” Mrs. Clinton told supporters. But she paid homage to Mr. Obama’s accomplishments, saying, “It has been an honor to contest the primaries with him, just as it is an honor to call him my friend.”
Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton talked early Wednesday morning by telephone. He congratulated her and renewed his offer to "sit down when it makes sense for you," according to a spokesman for Mr. Obama, Robert Gibbs.
Mrs. Clinton responded positively, Mr. Gibbs said, but added: "There are no plans to meet tomorrow."
Mr. Obama’s victory moved the presidential campaign to a new phase as he tangled with Senator John McCain of Arizona in televised addresses Tuesday night over Mr. Obama’s assertion that Mr. McCain would carry on President Bush’s policies. Mr. McCain vigorously rebuffed that criticism in a speech in Kenner, La., in which he distanced himself from the departing president while contrasting his own breadth of experience with Mr. Obama’s record.
“The American people didn’t get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama,” Mr. McCain told supporters.
Mr. Obama’s triumph closed a 16-month primary campaign that broke records on several fronts: the number of voters who participated, the amount of money raised and spent and the sheer length of the fight. The campaign, infused by tensions over race and gender, provided unexpected twists to the end as Mr. Obama ultimately prevailed over Mrs. Clinton, who just a year ago appeared headed toward becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party.
The last two primaries reflected the party’s continuing divisions, as Mrs. Clinton won the South Dakota contest and Mr. Obama won Montana.
The race drew to its final hours with a burst of announcements — delegate by delegate — of Democrats stepping forward to declare their support for Mr. Obama. The Democratic establishment, from former President Jimmy Carter to rank-and-file local officials who make up the party’s superdelegates, rallied behind Mr. Obama as the day wore on.
When the day began, Mr. Obama needed 41 delegates to effectively claim the nomination. By the time the polls closed in Montana and South Dakota, Mr. Obama had secured the delegates he needed to end his duel with Mrs. Clinton, which wound through every state and territory in an unprecedented 57 contests over five months.
Every time a new endorsement was announced at the Obama headquarters in Chicago, campaign workers interrupted with a booming round of applause, followed by popping Champagne corks later in the evening. The aides are members of Mr. Obama’s team — a political start-up — that is responsible for defeating one of the most tried and tested teams in Democratic politics.
While the Democratic race may have ended, a new chapter began in the complicated tensions that have defined the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. On a conference call with members of the New York Congressional delegation on Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton was asked whether she would be open to joining a ticket with Mr. Obama. She replied that she would do whatever she could — including a vice-presidential bid — to help Democrats win the White House.
Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Democrat of New York, asked Mrs. Clinton whether she would consider teaming up with Mr. Obama. “She said that if it’s offered, she would take it,” Ms. Velázquez said later in an interview.
Mrs. Clinton and her family huddled at her home in Chappaqua to discuss the timing of her departure from the race. At her rally on Tuesday evening, Mrs. Clinton delivered a 20-minute address, but did not directly address speculation about her future.
“Now, the question is, Where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly,” Mrs. Clinton said, speaking to supporters who were cheering one moment, somber the next. “This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight.”
As some supporters chanted “Denver! Denver!” referring to the city where Democrats will gather in late August to crown their nominee, she added, “In the coming days I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders determining how to move forward, with the best interest of my party and my country guiding my way.”
Lanny Davis, an aide in the Clinton White House, said he was circulating a petition asking Mr. Obama to pick Mrs. Clinton as his running mate. Mr. Davis said he was acting on his own.
Mr. Obama called Mrs. Clinton late Tuesday evening to congratulate her, but aides said he left a message because he could not reach her. In his speech, his supporters cheered as he paid respect to his rival.
“Our party and our country are better off because of her,” Mr. Obama said, “and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
But associates to Mr. Obama played down the vice-presidential speculation. And he made no reference to it in his 30-minute speech, which was delivered at the same arena in which Mr. McCain is expected to formally accept the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in early September.
“You can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory,” Mr. Obama told his supporters. “When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen.”
Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were both scheduled to speak on Wednesday morning in Washington at a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Mrs. Clinton’s public schedule ended there, but Mr. Obama was set to campaign on Thursday in Virginia, a state his campaign calls a battleground.
The competition between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama has been sharpening for weeks, but the close of the Democratic primary formally raised the curtain to a five-month general election contest. The race, as their respective speeches foreshadowed Tuesday evening, will unfold against a backdrop of an electorate that is restless about soaring gasoline prices, mortgage foreclosures and the Iraq war.
It is also a generational battle of personalities and contrasting styles. Mr. McCain staged an evening event in Louisiana so he would be included in the evening’s television narrative that otherwise belonged to Democrats.
About two hours later, Mr. Obama responded at a rally that offered a sharp contrast both in the size of the crowd and the energy in the room.
“There are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new,” Mr. Obama said. “But ‘change’ is not one of them.”

The Last Wish of Martin Luther King

2008-04-06T00:04:00.001-07:00

The New York Times

April 6, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Last Wish of Martin Luther King
By TAYLOR BRANCH

FORTY years ago on March 31, at the National Cathedral, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what would be his last Sunday sermon, on his way back to Memphis. That same night in 1968, President Johnson shocked the world by announcing that he would not seek re-election.
I was a senior in college. My mother was visiting four nights later when all conversation suddenly hushed in a busy restaurant. A waiter whispered that Dr. King had been shot.

Civil rights, Vietnam, Dr. King, Memphis — these are historic landmarks. Even so, this year is a watershed. Because Dr. King lived only 39 years, from now on, he will be gone longer than he lived among us. Two generations have come of age since Memphis.

This does not mean that our understanding is accurate or complete. A certain amount of gloss and mythology is inevitable for great figures, whether they be George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, Honest Abe splitting a rail or Dr. King preaching a dream of equal citizenship in 1963. Far beyond that, however, we have encased Dr. King and his era in pervasive myth, false to our heritage and dangerous to our future. We have distorted our entire political culture to avoid the lessons of Martin Luther King’s era.

He warned us himself. When he came to the pulpit that Sunday 40 years ago, Dr. King adapted one of his standard sermons, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” From the allegory of Rip Van Winkle, he told of a man who fell asleep before 1776 and awoke 20 years later in a world filled with strange customs and clothes, a whole new vocabulary, and a mystifying preoccupation with the commoner George Washington rather than King George III.
Dr. King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world’s continuing cries for freedom. When the ancient Hebrews achieved miraculous liberation from Egypt, many yearned to go back. Pharaoh’s familiar lash seemed better than the covenant delivered by Moses, and so the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. It took 40 years to recover their bearings. Dr. King has been gone 40 years now, but we still sleep under Pharaoh. It is time to wake up.

Dr. King had been in Memphis marching in support of sanitation workers. Two of them, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a mechanical malfunction; city rules forbade black employees to seek shelter from rain anywhere but in the back of their compressor trucks, with the garbage. But looting had broken out from Dr. King’s march, for the first time.

When he showed up in Washington that Sunday morning, he was scarcely the toast of the United States. Headlines in Memphis called him, “Chicken à la King,” with accusations that he had run from his own fight. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat called Dr. King “one of the most menacing men in America today,” and published a wild-eyed minstrel cartoon of him aiming a huge pistol from a cloud of gun smoke, with the caption, “I’m Not Firing It — I’m Only Pulling the Trigger.”
So Dr. King stood in the pulpit a marked man, scorned and rebuked, beset with inner conflicts. Yet as always, he lifted hope from the bottom of his soul. He urged the congregation to be alive and awake to great revolutions in progress. “I say to you that our goal is freedom,” he cried, “and I believe we’re going to get there because — however much she strays from it — the goal of America is freedom!”
We face daunting precedent in history. Our nation has slept for decades under the spell of myths grounded in race. I grew up being taught that the Civil War was about federalism, not slavery. My textbooks even used a religious term, the “redeemers,” to describe politicians who restored white supremacy with Ku Klux Klan terrorism late in the 19th century. Modern Hollywood was founded on the emotional power of that myth as portrayed in “The Birth of a Nation.” Progressive forces advocated racial hierarchy with a bogus science of eugenics.

More than once, the dominant culture has turned history upside down to make itself feel comfortable. And when a civil rights movement rose from the fringe of maids and sharecroppers, making it no longer respectable to defend racial segregation, wounded voices adapted again to curse government as the agent of general calamity. We have painted Dr. King’s era as a time of aimless, unbridled license, with hippies running amok.

The watchword of political discourse has degenerated from “movement” to “spin.” In Dr. King’s era, the word “movement” grew from a personal inspiration into leaps of faith, then from shared discovery and sacrifice into upward struggle, spawning kindred movements until great hosts from Selma to the Berlin Wall literally could feel the movement of history.

Now we have “spin” instead, suggesting that there is no real direction at stake from political debate, nor any consequence except for the players in a game. Such language embraces cynicism by reducing politics to entertainment.

Democratic balance has slept for 40 years, and we face a world like Rip Van Winkle run backward. We wake up blinking at Tiger Woods, Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, while our government demands arbitrary rule by secrecy, conquest and dungeons. King George III seems reborn.

Please resist any partisan connotation. Our problem is far too big for that. Indeed, I think the most pressing challenge for admirers of Dr. King is to recognize our own complicity in the stifling myths about civil rights history. Battered, long-suffering allies of Dr. King discarded him as a tired moderate long before the reactionary campaign to make the word “liberal” a kiss of death for candidates across the country. Similarly, forces called radical and militant turned against liberal governments for taking so long to respond to racial injustice, then for the Vietnam War. Only a convergence of the political left and right could cause such lasting erosion for the promise of free government itself.

Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé. It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.

We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. “We will win our freedom,” he said many times, “because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy — even as racial healers and reconcilers — is to diminish them under the spell of myth.

Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. You never heard of the Sun Belt when the South was segregated. The movement spread prosperity in a region previously unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves. Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.

The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and, yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background. Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott.

It is both right and politic for all people, including millions who are benign or indifferent toward the civil rights movement, or churlish and resentful, to see that they, too, and their heirs, stand with us on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.

We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.

SO what should we do, now that 40 years have passed? How do we restore our political culture from spin to movement, from muddle to purpose? We must take leaps, ask questions, study nonviolence, reclaim our history.

What Dr. King prescribed in his last Sunday sermon begins with the story of Lazarus and Dives, from the 16th chapter of Luke. Told entirely from the mouth of Jesus, it is a story starring Abraham the patriarch of Judaism, set in the afterlife. There’s nothing else like it in the Bible.
Dr. King loved this parable as the text for a fabled 1949 sermon by Vernon Johns, his predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Lazarus was a lame beggar who once pleaded unnoticed outside the sumptuous gates of a rich man called Dives. They both died, and Dives looked from torment to see Lazarus the beggar secure in the bosom of Abraham. The remainder of the parable is an argument between Abraham and Dives, calling back and forth from heaven to hell.

Dives first asked Abraham to “send Lazarus” with water to cool his burning lips. But Abraham said there was a “great chasm” fixed between them, which could never be crossed. In his sermon, Dr. Johns drew a connection between the chasm and segregation.

But according to Dr. Johns, Dives wasn’t in hell because he was rich. He wasn’t anywhere near as rich as Abraham, one of the wealthiest men in antiquity, who was there in heaven. Nor was Dives in hell because he had failed to send alms to Lazarus. He was there because he never recognized Lazarus as a fellow human being. Even faced with everlasting verdict, he spoke only with Abraham and looked past the beggar, treating him still as a servant in the third person — “send Lazarus.”

Dr. King’s sermons drew more layers of meaning from this parable. He said we must accept the suffering rich man as no ordinary, nasty sinner. When refused water for himself, he worried immediately about his five brothers. Dives asked Abraham again to send Lazarus, this time as a messenger to warn the brothers about their sin. Tell them to be nice to beggars outside the wall. Do something, please, so they don’t wind up here like me.
Dr. King said Dives was a liberal. Despite his own fate, he wanted to help others. Abraham rebuffed this request, too, telling Dives that his brothers already had ample warning in Torah law and the books of the Hebrew prophets. Still Dives persisted, saying no, Abraham, you don’t understand — if the brothers saw someone actually rise from the dead and warn them, then they would understand.

Jesus quotes Abraham saying no. If the brothers do not accept the core teaching of the Torah and the prophets, they won’t believe even a messenger risen from the dead. Dr. King said this parable from Jesus burns up differences between Judaism and Christianity. The lesson beneath any theology is that we must act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes. The alternative is hell, which Dr. King sometimes defined as the pain we inflict on ourselves by refusing God’s grace.

Dr. King then went back to Memphis to stand with the downtrodden workers, with the families of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. You may have seen the placards from the sanitation strike, which read “I Am a Man,” meaning not a piece of garbage to be crushed and ignored. For Dr. King, to answer was a patriotic and prophetic calling. He challenges everyone to find a Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth. That quest in common becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope.

Taylor Branch is the author, most recently, of “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume in his history of the modern civil rights era. This article was adapted from a speech he gave on Monday at the National Cathedral.

RESULT FOR PANEL DISCUSSION OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH at CAIRO IRC February 25th , 2008

2008-02-27T05:09:00.000-08:00

In this last of the CAIRO IRC celebrations for Black History Month, three panelists from the U.S. EMBASSY CAIRO gave complementary yet diverse perspectives on the celebrations of Black History Month and took questions from forty students, primarily from the University of Cairo and Ain Shams University. The three panelists were African American Foreign Service Officers working in the U.S. Embassy in CAIRO, two of the panelists are Muslim.

The Deputy Chief of Mission introduced the panelists and discussed the importance of Black History Month. The IRO served as moderator.

Mr. Abdul Rahman Kenyatta, Staff Aide to the Deputy Chief of Mission, spoke on Black History Month celebrations in the U.S. and also of the importance of Diversity, and how diversity has strengthened America, highlighting prominent African Americans.

Ms. Deneyse Kirkpatrick, Human Relations Officer, talked about the role of African Americans in building the U.S., and in very personal remarks, talked about her role models, her family, and her experiences at Howard University. Ms. Kirkpatrick affirmed that every day and every month should be Black History Month, as the achievements and successes of African Americans are ongoing and continuous.

Ms. Tammy Kenyatta, Vice Consul at the U.S. Embassy demolished stereotypes of African Americans in Politics, revealing the diversity amongst African Americans themselves. Fully 9% of African Americans vote for the Republican ticket in any election. She also spoke on what it as like to be an African American Muslim female.

40 participants came for this celebration, including many area students.
Participants were extremely enthusiastic about this panel discussion: One question from a young student was emblematic of the theme for Black History Month. She addressed the panel, asking, perhaps you, who have overcome so many obstacles to get where you are today, can give us Egyptians advice on how we should overcome our own difficulties? The answers the panelists gave were heartwarming: all noted that one should pick friends wisely; have a foundation of spirituality and commit to work hard and “never give up.”

RESULT: Students mingled with the panelists after the conference formally ended and asked questions one on one, far exceeding the allotted time. One of the audience members told me that Egyptians rarely have a chance to interact personally with American Muslims and Black Americans, and she would love to see more of these panels, noting how much her students loved this very informal interaction. As IRO, this was simply the best and most meaningful Black History Month celebration I have ever been associated with in any of the 18 Posts where I have either served, or organized similar events while on TDY.

NOTE: Three powerpoints played silently in the background as panelists were speaking: IIP’s Diversity Powerpoint; African Americans A-Z and famous Black Americans, focusing on the specific achievements of African Americans throughout U.S. History, all helping celebrate an extraordinary legacy.
The IRC created a portfolio for each student of IIP materials with articles, statistics, bios of panelists, African Americans in Congress and a mini-exhibit of sample books in our IRC on African Americans. W e also took the opportunity to highlight our brand-new blog for Black History Month: http://cairoircbhm.blogspot.com/
The IRC’s Suzy Metry did an extraordinary job in arranging this event.

Black History Theme--Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism

2008-02-25T04:42:00.000-08:00

Black History Theme--Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism-
http://www.asalh.org/

From its inception, America has been a landscape peopled by diverse ethnic and racial groups, and today virtually all peoples are represented. If America has always been racially and ethnically diverse, the nation's self-image has not always recognized its multicultural history. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, America has seen itself largely as the flowering of Anglo-Saxon culture and prided itself on allowing immigrants to adapt to the American way.During the early years of the twentieth century, a small number of intellectuals began to question whether America was simply a transplant of English civilization. W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Herzl, and Randolph Bourne believed that modern America should embrace the cultural differences that newcomers brought with them to America. Democracy, they believed, required tolerance of difference and could sustain those differences in harmony.Among those intellectuals of the Progressive era, Carter G. Woodson did most to forge an intellectual movement to educate Americans about cultural diversity and democracy. For the sake of African Americans and all Americans, Woodson heralded the contributions of African Americans and the black tradition. In 1915, he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and by the time of his death in 1950, he had laid the foundation for a rethinking of American identity. The multiculturalism of our times is built on the intellectual and institutional labors of Woodson and the association he established. He should be known not simply as the Father of Black History, but as pioneer of multiculturalism as well.

The African-American Experience

2008-02-24T00:17:00.000-08:00

The African-American Experience
From slavery to freedom, the African experience in America

Martin Luther King Jr. stands with his wife, Coretta, and daughter Yolanda in 1956.

History
03/29/2007 World War II African-American Airmen Receive Congressional Medal
02/14/2007 Growing Number of Museums Preserving Black History, Culture
07/25/2006 Documentary on Tuskegee Airmen Teaches Hope, Patriotism
09/26/2005 Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week
06/30/2005 Harlem Institution Focuses on People of African Descent
06/08/2005 A Homeric Life: W.E.B. Du Bois
06/08/2005 The Autobiography of a Conductor
06/08/2005 Traveling the Long Road to Freedom, One Step at a Time
06/08/2005 The Anger and the Irony
06/08/2005 Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History
06/29/2005 African-Americans Were Also Founders of America, Rice Says
05/19/2005 Powell Calls Underground Railroad a Unique Part of U.S. History
The Civil Rights Movement
08/20/2007 After Facing Mobs 50 Years Ago, Nine Go Home to Honors
05/30/2007 Prize-Winning Book Recounts Press Role in Civil Rights Era
03/23/2007 Little Rock Nine Member and Daughter Relive Struggle, Victory
02/05/2007 Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"
08/22/2006 American Civil Rights Sit-In Leader Robert McCullough Dies
08/18/2006 "Little Known But Quite Extraordinary" Civil Rights Group Honored
07/27/2006 Historic U.S. Minority Voters' Protections Extended for 25 Years
06/11/2006 Presidents, Celebrities Inaugurate Martin Luther King Memorial
02/08/2006 President Bush Addresses Coretta King Memorial Service
01/31/2006 Coretta Scott King Dead at 78
12/01/2005 U.S. Marks 50th Anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott
10/31/2005 America Pays Respects to Civil Rights Leader Rosa Parks
10/26/2005 Civil Rights Catalyst Rosa Parks Dead at 92
08/17/2005 Education Secretary Observes Anniversary of School Desegregation
08/15/2005 The Voting Rights Act in Perspective
08/15/2005 Martin Luther King's Dream of Racial Equality
07/15/2005 Martin Luther King Jr: the March, the Man, the Dream
06/30/2005 Rosina Tucker -- A Century of Commitment
06/30/2005 Activist Dorothy Height Speaks of the Struggle for Civil Rights
06/08/2005 The Nonstop from Durham
06/08/2005 The King We Left Behind
06/08/2005 Dr. King's Legacy Through The Eyes of Artists
06/08/2005 The Martin Luther King We Remember
05/26/2005 Opening Doors to Equality
The Arts
11/27/2007 African Americans’ Struggles, Triumphs Shown in Photo Exhibition
08/03/2007 Gee’s Bend Quilters Create Art from Scraps of Fabric
06/22/2007 White House Celebrates Black Music
05/10/2007 Lucille Clifton First Black Woman To Win Lilly Poetry Prize
04/18/2007 Urban Poetry Walk Takes Verse to the Streets
12/27/2006 “American Original” James Brown Inspired Many
08/25/2006 Blues Legend B.B. King Still Performing at Age 81
08/01/2006 Glimpsing Louis Armstrong: A Critic Remembers
06/28/2006 Gulf Coast Musicians Celebrate Black Music Month at White House
05/24/2006 Romare Bearden: Man of Many Parts
05/17/2006 A "First Look" at New African Exhibit Reveals Some Treasures
04/03/2006 America Savors Its Music During Jazz Appreciation Month
03/09/2006 Gordon Parks Dead at 93
02/15/2006 Meet August Wilson, a Playwright for an American Century
02/07/2006 President Bush Honors Dance Theatre of Harlem
01/20/2006 Exhibit Showcases Afro-Latino Experience in the United States
01/20/2006 Wilson Pickett Dead at 64
10/03/2005 Honored Playwright August Wilson Dead at 60
10/03/2005 Smithsonian Acquires World-Famous African Art Collection
09/13/2005 The Case of a Slave Poet, a Forgotten Historical Episode
06/30/2005 From 'Caged Bird' to 'Delta': A Conversation with Maya Angelou
06/30/2005 First Lady Hosts Salute to Harlem Renaissance Writers
06/30/2005 William Greaves, Pioneering African-American Filmmaker
06/30/2005 America and Art Through the Eyes of an African Artist
06/30/2005 U.S. Postage Stamp Honors Harlem's Langston Hughes
06/21/2005 Bush Hails Black Music's Historical Role in United States
06/08/2005 A Pioneering Black Film Maker
05/18/2005 Jazz, Originally American, Now Celebrated Around the World
Sports
04/13/2007 Tribute to Baseball Great Jackie Robinson Benefits Charities
02/02/2007 Black Americans Have Rich History in Professional Baseball
11/03/2005 Monument to Baseball Greats Robinson, Reese Unveiled
09/06/2005 Negro Leagues Gave Female Baseball Legend Her Start
09/06/2005 1955 Little League Baseball Team Honored
05/18/2005 United States Honors Baseball Great Jackie Robinson
05/18/2005 U.S. President, Congress Honor "Fantastic and Noble" Sports Hero
Business
02/06/2007 Companies Say Blacks in Management Give a Competitive Edge
08/10/2005 John H. Johnson, American Publisher and Businessman, Dies
Politics and Law
02/16/2007 Thurgood Marshall Played Role in Kenyan Independence
01/18/2007 Congressional Black Caucus Champions Issues Concerning Minorities
11/09/2006 First Muslim Elected to the U.S. Congress
10/03/2005 Judge Constance Baker Motley Dead at 84
08/08/2005 Shirley Chisholm Dead at 80

Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"

2008-02-21T02:45:00.001-08:00

05 February 2007
Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"
Hastily organized civil-rights march called for "Sort of a Gettysburg Address"

Martin Luther King Jr. looks through the bars of a Burmingham, Alabama, cell in April 1963. (National Archives)
Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”By Douglas Brinkley
"There are two types of laws, just and unjust," wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from jail on Easter weekend, 1963. "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." St. Thomas Aquinas would not have disagreed. The image burnished into national memory is the Dr. King of "I Have a Dream," delivered 40 years ago in Washington, D.C. So it's hard to conjure up the 34-year-old in a narrow cell in Birmingham City Jail, hunkered down alone at sunset, using the margins of newspapers and the backs of legal papers to articulate the philosophical foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.
"Letter From Birmingham City Jail," now considered a classic of world literature, was crafted as a response to eight local white clergymen who had denounced Dr. King's nonviolent protest in the Birmingham News, demanding an end to the demonstrations for desegregation of lunch counters, restrooms and stores. Dr. King's letter had to be smuggled out of the jail in installments by his attorneys, arriving thought by thought at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's makeshift nerve center at the Gaston Motel. An intensely disciplined Christian, Dr. King was able to mold a modern manifesto of nonviolent resistance out of the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi.
Throughout the 1960s the very word "Birmingham" conjured up haunting images of church bombings and the brutality of Eugene "Bull" Connor's police, snarling dogs and high-powered fire hoses. When King spent his nine days in the Birmingham jail, it was one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the South, although African Americans made up 40 percent of the population. As Harrison Salisbury wrote in The New York Times, "the streets, the water supply, and the sewer system" were the only public facilities shared by both races. Yet by the time Dr. King was murdered in Memphis five years later, his philosophy had triumphed and Jim Crow laws had been smashed. "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" would eventually be translated into more than 40 languages.
Thanks to Dr. King's letter, "Birmingham" had become a clarion call for action by the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, especially in the 1980s, when the international outcry to free Nelson Mandela reached its zenith. Archbishop Desmond Tutu quoted the letter in his sermons, Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley kept the text with him for good luck, and Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah's children chanted from it as though Dr. King's text were a holy writ. During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, Poland's Solidarity and East Germany's Pastors' Movement all had "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" translated and disseminated to the masses via the underground.
Just as Dr. King had been inspired by Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," written in a Massachusetts jail to protest the Mexican-American War, a new generation of the globally oppressed embraced the letter as a source of courage and inspiration. Segregation and apartheid were supported by clearly unjust laws--because they distorted the soul and damaged the psyche. Dr. King's remedy: nonviolent direct action, the only spiritually valid way to bring gross injustice to the surface, where it could be seen and dealt with.
In Jerusalem in 1983, Mubarak Awad, an American-educated clinical psychologist, translated the letter for Palestinians to use in their workshops to teach students about nonviolent struggle. When a Chinese student stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, unflinching in his democratic convictions, he was symbolically acting upon the teachings of Dr. King as elucidated in his fearless Birmingham letter.
Argentinian human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was inspired in part by King's letter to create Servicio Paz y Justicia, a Latin American organization that documented the tragedy of the desaparecidos. Today one would be hard-pressed to find an African novelist or poet, including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, who had not been spurred to denounce authoritarianism by King's notion that it was morally essential to become a bold protagonist for justice. Even conservative Republican William J. Bennett included "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" in his Book of Virtues.
The universal appeal of Dr. King's letter lies in the hope it provides the disinherited of the earth, the millions of voiceless poor who populate the planet from the garbage dumps of Calcutta to the AIDS villages of Haiti. His letter describes the "shameful humiliation" and "inexpressible cruelties" of American slavery, and just as Dr. King was forced to reduce his sacred thoughts to the profane words of the newspaper in order to triumph over injustice, African Americans would win their freedom someday because "the sacred heritage of our nations and eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands."
The National Park Service has designated Sweet Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, where Dr. King lived and is buried, a historic district. Banks, businesses and government offices are closed to honor the civil rights martyr every January. But the living tribute to Dr. King, the one that would have delighted him most, is the impact that his "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" has had on three generations of international freedom fighters.
These pages of poetry and justice now stand as one of the supreme 20th-century instruction manuals of self-help on how Davids can stand up to Goliaths without spilling blood. As an eternal statement that resonates hope in the valleys of despair, "Letter From Birmingham City Jail" is unrivaled, an American document as distinctive as the Declaration of Independence or the Emancipation Proclamation.
The preceding article appeared as a sidebar in David Garrow's article, "King: The March The Man The Dream,” published in American History magazine, August 2003.
Permission has been granted for web-site use and republication/translation by U.S. Public Diplomacy offices and in the press outside the United States. On title page, credit author, source and carry: Copyright and ©2003 by PRIMEDIA Enthusiast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.This page printed from: http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2007/February/20070205165927eaifas0.9735529.html

Black History Month Honors Stories of Determination and Triumph

2008-02-21T02:29:00.000-08:00

31 January 2008
Black History Month Honors Stories of Determination and Triumph
African Americans' contributions to United States are highlighted each February

Carter G. Woodson, founder of Black History Month. (National Park Service)
Washington -- Each February, Black History Month honors the struggles and triumphs of millions of American citizens over the most devastating obstacles -- slavery, prejudice, poverty – as well as their contributions to the nation’s cultural and political life.
2008 marks the 82nd annual celebration since Carter G. Woodson, a noted scholar and historian, instituted Negro History Week in 1926. He chose the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. President Gerald R. Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
Woodson, the son of former slaves in Virginia, realized that the struggles and achievements of Americans of African descent were being ignored or misrepresented. He founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which supports historical research, publishes a scholarly journal and sets the theme for Black History Month each year.
The theme for 2008, “Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism,” honors Woodson’s contributions and his belief “that America should embrace the cultural differences that newcomers brought with them to America,” according to the ASALH Web site. Woodson and other black intellectuals of the early twentieth century believed that democracy “required tolerance of difference and could sustain those differences in harmony.”
John Fleming, ASALH president and director emeritus of the Cincinnati Museum Center, believes Black History Month should focus on both positive and negative aspects of the black experience.

The 2007 Black Heritage stamp honors the first lady of song, Ella Fitzgerald. (USPS)
“Certainly, struggle has been an ongoing theme in our history from the very beginning,” he said. “However, we were not slaves prior to being captured in Africa -- and while slavery was part of our experience for 250 years, we have a hundred-and-some years in freedom that we also need to deal with. That’s not to diminish the slavery period, but it’s not just the most encompassing thing.”
Fleming said he has seen “substantial progress on many fronts,” noting that about 10 percent of congressional representatives are black as well as hundreds of mayors across the United States, and that more blacks are “moving into the middle class and various professions.” (See related article.)
“At the same time there are still major problems that have to be addressed, one being the permanent underclass in urban areas now -- we don’t seem to be able to break that cycle of poverty. And there are still some major rural pockets of poverty” such as in the Mississippi Delta, he continued.
“I’m glad to see the National African American Museum being developed on the Mall, which will tell a much broader story,” said Fleming. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed legislation to establish the new museum, which will be located on the National Mall near the Washington Monument. Although the new museum has not yet been built, it has launched a photo exhibition that is housed at the National Portrait Gallery. (See related article.)
“From talking with young people, black and white students, the lack of knowledge about African-American history is just appalling,” Fleming said. This applies to the general population, he said: “That’s why Carter G. Woodson came out with Negro History Week in the first place.”
“I think that African-American history gets more attention during February than during any other time of year, “ he said, “and I think it’s an opportunity for us in the field to emphasize that it is something that should be studied throughout the year.”
Each year, the U.S. president honors Black History Month, or African American History Month as it is also called, with a proclamation and a celebration at the White House. States and cities hold their own events around the country, and media feature topics related to black history.
“Throughout our Nation's history, African Americans from all walks of life have offered their talents to the betterment of American society,” Bush said in this year’s proclamation, issued on January 29. “We are reminded of their courage in their struggle to change the hearts and minds of our citizens. While much progress has been made, we must continue to work together to achieve the promise and vision of our great Nation.” (See related text.)
ASALH has its headquarters in Washington, where Woodson lived from 1915 until his death in 1950. His home is designated a national historic site. More information is available at the ASALH Web site.This page printed from: http://www.america.gov/st/diversity-english/2008/January/20070126175516xlrennef0.8811151.html

WEBLIOGRAPHY

2008-02-21T02:25:00.000-08:00

SELECTED WEBLIOGRAPHY
FOR
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH

Information Resources Center, Public Affairs Section
U.S. Embassy in Cairo
Website: http//egypt.usembassy.gov
TEL: 27973124 - FAX: 27973400
E-mail: cairoirc@state.gov

SELECTED WEBLIOGRAPHY
FOR
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH
Prepared by: IRO Stephen Perry and IRC Specialist Suzan Metry
Email: perryls@state.gov ----- Email: metrysn@state.gov

Many of our IRC webliographies may be found at this address:
http://irosteveperry.pbwiki/irosteveperry

Introduction
The History of African American History Month

I. HOW TO RESEARCH AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY:

1. Basic Resources from Rutgers University Libraries
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~natalieb/afroam.htm

2. Detailed Research Guide to African American Studies
http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/history/afrores.shtml

3. From the African Studies Collection at University of Pennsylvania
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Home_Page/mcgee.html

4. African Americans from the University of California at Santa Barbara
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subj/black.html

5. Resources in Black Studies: L.O.C. SITES containing links to Historical Texts
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?category=African%20American%20History

6. Ohio State University: Another Gateway to Information
http://library.osu.edu/sites/thegateway/

II. FROM AMERICA.GOV WEBSITE: DEPARTMENT OF STATE
http://www.america.gov/

Presidential Proclamation on National African American History Month
Bush honors achievements, rich heritage of African Americans
http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2008/January/20080130180130eaifas0.9380457.html

Black History Month Honors Stories of Determination and Triumph
African Americans' contributions to United States are highlighted each February
http://amlife.america.gov/amlife/diversity/index.html

(A) Population & Diversity http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and_diversity.html

(B) Civil Rights
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/civil_rights.html

(C) African American History Month
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and_diversity/african_americans/African_American_History_Month.html

(D) Additional Resources: U.S. History, Geography & Population: African American History Month
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and_diversity/african_americans/african_american_history_month/african_american_history_month_texts.html

(E) Census Facts 2006 for African Americans: Facts for Features
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/006088.html

(F) Publications http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and_diversity/population_diversity_publications.html

Publication: “FREE AT LAST: The U.S. Civil Right Movement”
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/civilrights/index.html

(G) Organizations concerned with African Americans in U.S.
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/civil_rights/civil_rights_orgs.html

(H) Legal Resources from INFO USA
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/civil_rights/african_american_rights/african_american_rights_legal.html

(I) Timeline of Civil Rights Movement
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/civil_rights/african_american_rights/african_american_rights_timeline.html

(J) Online Reading
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/civil_rights/african_american_rights/african_american_rights_online.html

(K) E Journal on Race: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0897/ijse/tocsv.htm

(L) E-Journals in Arabic: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/journalsaraba.htm

III. AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

1. African American Women Authors: from the NY Public Library
http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/toc.html

2. Example of a Digitized Text
http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs-t/wwm975/@Generic__BookView

3. Harlem Renaissance Resources: PAL: Perspective in American Literature-A research and reference Guide-Ongoing project
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/chap9.html

4. African American Women: from the Duke University Special Collection
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/collections/african-american-women.html

5. African American Literature analysis, from USINFO
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/stepto.htm

6. African Americans Literature Bibliography, from USINFO
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and%20diversity/african_americans/african_americans_biblio.html

7. African American Writers: Online E-texts
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm

8. An African-American Reader: Essays on African American History Culture and Society.
Editors: William R. Scott and William G. Shade, Lehigh University March 2005
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/AAReader.pdf
Is an anthology of essays on African-American history, culture, and society for advanced students, teachers, and scholars.

“Currents in American Scholarship” SERIES: Publications
Title: Philosophy in the United States
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/01_2005.pdf
Title: The Study of American Politics
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/12_2004.pdf
Title: New Directions in American Literary Scholarship 1980-2002
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/american_literary_scholarship.pdf
Title: Twentieth Century United States History
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/history.pdf
Title: American Studies Bibliography http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/AmBibliography.pdf
Title: American Religious History http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/ReligionCAS.pdf
Title: Currents in American Scholarship: American Studies Bibliography
http://www.exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents/AmBibliography.pdf

IV. DIGITIZED COLLECTIONS

1. Digitized Collections: from Encyclopedia Britannica’s Guide
http://www.britannica.com/Blackhistory/home.do;jsessionid=33ECE98105E5BCCC50A00E3A1B82E017

2. From Documenting the American South Project: Slave Narratives
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html

3. Library of Congress Collections
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml

4. The LOC Digitized Collection via the American Memory Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/

5. Schomburg Collection: From Library of Congress: Slave Narrative Project
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html

6. Schomburg Collection: The New York Public Library
http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html

7. African American Collections, via LOC American Memory Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?category=African%20American%20History

8. Digitized Collection via Georgetown University Project for American Studies
http://lumen.georgetown.edu/projects/asw/aswlinks.cfm?head1=Race%2C%20Ethnicity%2C%20and%20Identity&head2=African%20American%20Resources

9. African Online Digital Library
http://www.aodl.org/

V. MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

1. Afro-American Museum in Boston - Links
http://www.afroammuseum.org/links.htm

2. Smithsonian Museum
http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmah/afroam.htm

3. Smithsonian: The National Museum of African American History and Culture http://nmaahc.si.edu/

4. Museums: from USINFO
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/poulation_and_diversity/african_americans/african_americans_museums.html

VI. CONTINUING EDUCATION THROUGH AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES
Online courses, Essays, Perspectives

1. From USINFO: Essays on African American History Culture and Society
http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/history_geography_and_population/population_and_diversity/african_americans/african_americans_museums.html

2. MIT Distance Education
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

3. Course on Writing about Race in MIT
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

4. An example from a course on American Women writers
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-512American-Authors--American-Women-AuthorsSpring2003/RelatedResources/index.htm

VII. LINKS TO UNIVERSITIES

University of California, Santa Barbara
URL: http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subj/black.html.
This is a very manageable site with access to a range of data-types. The site has 16 broad categories and is especially strong in news media, historical texts, and documents.

Soul Search: The Search Engine for the World's People of Color.
Access: http://www.soulsearch.net/
This is a search engine for accessing information contained in the African American Web Ring. One of many "Web rings" forming on the Internet, this one has collected over 1,000 sites related to African American culture including art, dance, history, and personal pages.
Soul Search: African American Web Ring:
URL: http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring.

Rutgers University Libraries: Research Guides: History-American & British sources on the Internet
URL: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/history/afrores.shtml
Internet Resources for Students of African-American History and Culture from Rutgers University Library, including access to text collections and special sources from 18th, 19th and 20th Century, covering also individual electronic texts, associations, organizations plus a tool for finding articles.
Georgetown University: Race & Ethnicity-African-American.
URL: http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/asw/afam.html
Part of their American Studies Web pages, this is an alphabetical listing of a nice variety of sites not often linked elsewhere.

VIII. FULL TEXT JOURNALS

1. CALLALOO
http://muse.jhy.edu/journals/callaloo

2. AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY: The Online Journal of African Studies.
URL: http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/

3. AFRICA NEWS ONLINE: Gateway to a Continent.
URL: http://www.africanews.org/

VIV. FULL TEXT DATABASES OF THE IRC

EBSCO
PROQUEST
NEWSPAPERS
STATISTICS
MANY OTHERS

Updated February 18, 2008
ALL LINKS VERIFIED AS OF FEBRUARY 2008

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February 2007

A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
WEBSITES & ARTICLES
ON
SLAVE NARRATIVE

I. Best Websites on Slavery

From Library of Congress:

African American collections:
http://www.loc.gov/africanamericans/

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920
From Slavery to Freedom: The African American Pamphlet Collection, 1822-1909
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860
Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories

FROM THE DOCUMENTING THE AMERICAN SOUTH RESEARCH HISTORY PROJECT: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ and http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/texts.html

FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/wpahome.html
From ABOUT.COM: http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/slavenarratives/Slave_Narratives.htm
From the History Department at Washington State university:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/slave.htm
And:
Selections from the Wpa Slave Narratives Digital Projects:
http://newdeal.feri.org/asn/

II. ARTICLES

As If I Had Entered A Paradise": Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History. By Nancy Kang. African American Review, Fall 2005, vol. 39, Iss. 3, p. 431-457.

Black Female Authorship and the African American Graphic Novel: Historical Responsibility In Icon: A Hero's Welcome. By Jennifer D Ryan.
Modern Fiction Studies, Winter 2006, vol. 52, Iss. 4, p. 918-946, 4, 1029.

Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered. By Christine Levecq. African American Review, Spring 2001, vol. 35, Iss. 1, p. 136-138.

Charles Johnson's Middle Passage: Fictionalizing history and historicizing fiction.
By Marc Steinberg. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Winter 2003, vol. 45, Iss. 4, p. 375-390.

Dialect and Identity in Harriet Jacobs's Autobiography and Other Slave Narratives.
By Albert Tricomi. Callaloo, Spring, 2006, vol. 29, Iss. 2, p. 619-633,704.

Found Voices: The Slave Narratives. By Graham Hodges. The Journal of American History, December 2000, vol. 87, Iss. 3, p. 1152-1153.

Four Slave Narratives From the Old North State. By George Hovis. The Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 2004/2005, vol. 58, Iss. 1/2, p. 397-404.

Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition.
By Reggie Young. African American Review, Winter 2000, vol. 34, Iss. 4, p. 710-712.

Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative. By Marc Steinberg. African American Review, Fall 2004, vol. 38, Iss. 3, p. 467-476.

Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women's Slave Naratives.
By Sharon L Jones. MELUS, Fall 2000, vol. 25, Iss. 3/4, p. 307-310.

Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary. By Walter Gobel.
African American Review, Spring 2002, vol. 36, Iss. 1, p. 140-141.

Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. By Ryan Jerving. The New England Quarterly, December 2000, vol. 73, Iss. 4, p. 682-684.

Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom As Auto (bio)ethnography. By Michael A Chaney. African American Review, Fall 2001, vol. 35, Iss. 3, p. 391-408

Plenty Ventured, Plenty Gained: African American Literary Scholarship and the New Century. By Warren J. Carson. Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2003, vol. 36, Iss. 1, p. 146-152.

Representing the West in the Arabic Language: The Slave Narrative of Omar Ibn Said. By Ghada Osman and Camille F. Forbes. Journal of Islamic Studies, September 2004, vol. 15, Iss. 3, p. 331.

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies: Studies in Romanticism. By Debbie Lee. Studies in Romanticism, June 2004, vol. 43, Iss. 2,
p. 307-309.

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. By Nigel Leask.
The Review of English Studies, August 2002, vol. 53, Iss. 211, p. 445.

Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric Of Author Portraiture. By Lynn A Casmier-Paz.
New Literary History, Winter 2003, vol. 34, Iss. 1, p. 91.

Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. By Alfred L. Brophy. The Journal of American History. December 2006, vol. 93, Iss. 3, p. 871-872.

"The Soul Has Bandaged Moments": Reading the African American Gothic in Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home," Morrison's Beloved, and Gomez's. By Cedric Gael
Bryant. African American Review, Winter 2005, vol. 39, Iss. 4, p. 541-553.

Spooked: The White Slave Narratives. By Stephan Talty. Transition, 2000, Iss. 85,
p. 48-75.

Stealing A Way: African Diaspora Maroon Poetics. By Suzette Spencer.
American Quarterly, December 2003, vol. 55, Iss. 4, p. 819.

The Strangest Freaks of Despotism: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives, African American Review. By Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman.
African American Review, Summer 2006, vol. 40, Iss. 2, p. 223-237.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade And American Slavery. By Ellen Bucy.
Magazine of History, April 2003, vol. 17, Iss. 3, p. 55-56.

Truth in timbre: Morrison's Extension of Slave Narrative Song in Beloved.
By Peter J Capuano. African American Review, Spring 2003, vol. 37, Iss. 1, p. 95-103.

The Use of Slave Narratives in High School English Class. By Susan Arpajian Jolley. English Journal, March 2002, vol. 91, Iss. 4, p. 33-38.

Using the Wpa Ex-Slave Narratives To Study The Impact Of The Great Depression. By Stephanie J Shaw. The Journal of Southern History, August 2003, vol. 69, Iss. 3, p. 623.

Women's Voices, Black and White. By Pearl A McHaney. Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2000, vol. 33, Iss. 1, p. 158-164.

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NOTE: To request a copy of any of the listed articles, contact Ms. Nahed George
by phone at 797-3124; or by e-mail:georgeng@state.gov

Black History Collection

2008-02-21T01:45:00.000-08:00