Download or read book Forty Million Dollar Slaves written by William C. Rhoden and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—Ebony From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built. Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays. Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ “evolution” has merely been a journey from literal plantations—where sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirrings—to today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the “conveyor belt” that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media. He also sets his sights on athletes like Michael Jordan, who he says have abdicated their responsibility to the community with an apathy that borders on treason. The power black athletes have today is as limited as when masters forced their slaves to race and fight. The primary difference is, today’s shackles are invisible. Praise for Forty Million Dollar Slaves “A provocative, passionate, important, and disturbing book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Brilliant . . . a beautifully written, complex, and rich narrative.”—Washington Post Book World “A powerful call for more black athletes to give back to their communities.”—Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Slaves Among Us written by Monique Villa and published by . This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a foreword by trafficking survivor Evelyn Chumbow, of The Human Trafficking Legal Center.The horrific world of modern slavery is exposed in this book based on the first-hand experiences of victims of human trafficking.Through the stories of three remarkable individuals who share how they fell victim to traffickers and how their bodies and souls resisted an enterprise of total destruction, Monique Villa takes us around the world--from Ohio to Tokyo, London to India, Qatar to Colombia--to uncover a parallel world where men, women, and children are dehumanized and reduced to obedient machines. Written by a global leader in the fight against human trafficking, this powerful book uncovers the hidden world of slaves--no longer physically in chains--who walk among us, trapped in a cycle of exploitation. Despite significant progress in the fight for human rights, slavery continues to flourish. In fact, there are more slaves today, in countries rich and poor, than at any point in the past. By giving voice to survivors of this horrific trade, Villa vividly illustrates dire situations we can do something about. Her call to action outlines concrete steps to safeguard the vulnerable among us and to eliminate slavery in our time.The author is donating all proceeds from sales of this book to help combat human trafficking.

Download or read book Blood and Earth written by Kevin Bales and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of such crusading works of nonfiction as Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains comes a powerful and captivating examination of two entwined global crises: environmental destruction and human trafficking—and an inspiring, bold plan for how we can solve them. A leading expert on modern-day slavery, Kevin Bales has traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places documenting and battling human trafficking. In the course of his reporting, Bales began to notice a pattern emerging: Where slavery existed, so did massive, unchecked environmental destruction. But why? Bales set off to find the answer in a fascinating and moving journey that took him into the lives of modern-day slaves and along a supply chain that leads directly to the cellphones in our pockets. What he discovered is that even as it destroys individuals, families, and communities, new forms of slavery that proliferate in the world’s lawless zones also pose a grave threat to the environment. Simply put, modern-day slavery is destroying the planet. The product of seven years of travel and research, Blood and Earth brings us dramatic stories from the world’s most beautiful and tragic places, the environmental and human-rights hotspots where this crisis is concentrated. But it also tells the stories of some of the most common products we all consume—from computers to shrimp to jewelry—whose origins are found in these same places. Blood and Earth calls on us to recognize the grievous harm we have done to one another, put an end to it, and recommit to repairing the world. This is a clear-eyed and inspiring book that suggests how we can begin the work of healing humanity and the planet we share. Praise for Blood and Earth “A heart-wrenching narrative . . . Weaving together interviews, history, and statistics, the author shines a light on how the poverty, chaos, wars, and government corruption create the perfect storm where slavery flourishes and environmental destruction follows. . . . A clear-eyed account of man’s inhumanity to man and Earth. Read it to get informed, and then take action.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[An] exposé of the global economy’s ‘deadly dance’ between slavery and environmental disaster . . . Based on extensive travels through eastern Congo’s mineral mines, Bangladeshi fisheries, Ghanian gold mines, and Brazilian forests, Bales reveals the appalling truth in graphic detail. . . . Readers will be deeply disturbed to learn how the links connecting slavery, environmental issues, and modern convenience are forged.”—Publishers Weekly “This well-researched and vivid book studies the connection between slavery and environmental destruction, and what it will take to end both.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review) “This is a remarkable book, demonstrating once more the deep links between the ongoing degradation of the planet and the ongoing degradation of its most vulnerable people. It’s a bracing reminder that a mentality that allows throwaway people also allows a throwaway earth.”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Download or read book The Invisible Line written by Daniel J. Sharfstein and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Invisible Line" shines light on one of the most important, but too often hidden, aspects of American history and culture. Sharfstein's narrative of three families negotiating America's punishing racial terrain is a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States." --Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear. In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Download or read book Disposable People written by Kevin Bales and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery is illegal throughout the world, yet more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions. Kevin Bales's disturbing story of slavery today reaches from brick kilns in Pakistan and brothels in Thailand to the offices of multinational corporations. His investigation of conditions in Mauritania, Brazil, Thailand, Pakistan, and India reveals the tragic emergence of a "new slavery," one intricately linked to the global economy. The new slaves are not a long-term investment as was true with older forms of slavery, explains Bales. Instead, they are cheap, require little care, and are disposable. Three interrelated factors have helped create the new slavery. The enormous population explosion over the past three decades has flooded the world's labor markets with millions of impoverished, desperate people. The revolution of economic globalization and modernized agriculture has dispossessed poor farmers, making them and their families ready targets for enslavement. And rapid economic change in developing countries has bred corruption and violence, destroying social rules that might once have protected the most vulnerable individuals. Bales's vivid case studies present actual slaves, slaveholders, and public officials in well-drawn historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. He observes the complex economic relationships of modern slavery and is aware that liberation is a bitter victory for a child prostitute or a bondaged miner if the result is starvation. Bales offers suggestions for combating the new slavery and provides examples of very positive results from organizations such as Anti-Slavery International, the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil, and the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan. He also calls for researchers to follow the flow of raw materials and products from slave to marketplace in order to effectively target campaigns of "naming and shaming" corporations linked to slavery. Disposable People is the first book to point the way to abolishing slavery in today's global economy. All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund anti-slavery projects around the world.

Download or read book From Slaveships to Scholarships written by Charles Pinkney and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when black athletes are commonly compared to the African slaves, Dr. Pinckney attempts to draw a connection to William Rhoden’s “Forty Million Dollar Slaves” and Harry Edward’s earlier work about the black athletes’ integration and segregation issues. Furthermore, this book is an attempt to chronicle the past and current history of blacks in sports. This book reads like a hybrid book—part history, part sociology, and part current issues. Dr. Pinckney captures the rise and slow decline of segregation in college and professional athletics. Dr. Pinckney examines how social and political forces imposed policies of racism, and explains the social forces that eventually forced blacks and historical black colleges and universities to accept second class–segregated competition. By some accounts five hundred years ago, our African ancestors were running from the slave catcher and slave ships to avoid slavery; however, today the descendants of slaves are still running. In fact, they are running, jumping, shooting baskets, and catching odd-shaped balls for their masters. Sporting events such as track and field, football, and basketball are mainly dominated by blacks. On any given Saturday afternoon at majority-white institutions, the black athlete can be found entertaining not only their immediate white master, but their white masters in terms of the disproportionate number of white fans, including faculty, staff, and college administrators. This in itself has predated far too many black athletes to slavery and the conditions of modern-day slavery at the hand of athletics. Truly, sports in America today as we know it has psychologically damaged the black athlete.

Download or read book A Muslim American Slave written by Omar Ibn Said and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Download or read book The Heritage written by Howard Bryant and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following in the footsteps of Robeson, Ali, Robinson and others, today’s Black athletes re-engage with social issues and the meaning of American patriotism Named a best book of 2018 by Library Journal It used to be that politics and sports were as separate from one another as church and state. The ballfield was an escape from the world’s worst problems, top athletes were treated like heroes, and cheering for the home team was as easy and innocent as hot dogs and beer. “No news on the sports page” was a governing principle in newsrooms. That was then. Today, sports arenas have been transformed into staging grounds for American patriotism and the hero worship of law enforcement. Teams wear camouflage jerseys to honor those who serve; police officers throw out first pitches; soldiers surprise their families with homecomings at halftime. Sports and politics are decidedly entwined. But as journalist Howard Bryant reveals, this has always been more complicated for black athletes, who from the start, were committing a political act simply by being on the field. In fact, among all black employees in twentieth-century America, perhaps no other group had more outsized influence and power than ballplayers. The immense social responsibilities that came with the role is part of the black athletic heritage. It is a heritage built by the influence of the superstardom and radical politics of Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos through the 1960s; undermined by apolitical, corporate-friendly “transcenders of race,” O. J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods in the following decades; and reclaimed today by the likes of LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, and Carmelo Anthony. The Heritage is the story of the rise, fall, and fervent return of the athlete-activist. Through deep research and interviews with some of sports’ best-known stars—including Kaepernick, David Ortiz, Charles Barkley, and Chris Webber—as well as members of law enforcement and the military, Bryant details the collision of post-9/11 sports in America and the politically engaged post-Ferguson black athlete.

Download or read book Complicity written by Anne Farrow and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

Download or read book A Crime So Monstrous written by E. Benjamin Skinner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on four years of research in over a dozen countries across the globe, journalist Skinner provides a shocking expos of the inner workings of the modern-day slave trade. Maps.

Download or read book Slavery by Another Name written by Douglas A. Blackmon and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Download or read book Modern Slavery written by Siddharth Kara and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Siddharth Kara is a tireless chronicler of the human cost of slavery around the world. He has documented the dark realities of modern slavery in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing systems that strip people of their dignity for the sake of profit—and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In Modern Slavery, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the astonishing scope of slavery and offer a concrete path toward its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to debt bondage in the Southeast Asian construction sector to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than fifty countries around the globe—including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors—Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Slavery offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the enormous scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, Modern Slavery unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the powerless. This searing exposé documents one of humanity’s greatest wrongs and lays out the framework for a comprehensive plan to eradicate it.

Download or read book The Revolt of the Black Athlete written by Harry Edwards and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Revolt of the Black Athlete hit sport and society like an Ali combination. This Fiftieth Anniversary edition of Harry Edwards's classic of activist scholarship arrives even as a new generation engages with the issues he explored. Edwards's new introduction and afterword revisit the revolts by athletes like Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. At the same time, he engages with the struggles of a present still rife with racism, double-standards, and economic injustice. Again relating the rebellion of black athletes to a larger spirit of revolt among black citizens, Edwards moves his story forward to our era of protests, boycotts, and the dramatic politicization of athletes by Black Lives Matter. Incisive yet ultimately hopeful, The Revolt of the Black Athlete is the still-essential study of the conflicts at the interface of sport, race, and society.

Download or read book A Slave No More written by David W. Blight and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.

Download or read book The Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume 3 AD 1420 AD 1804 written by David Eltis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

Download or read book Breaking the Line written by Samuel G. Freedman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the 1967 football season leading up to that year's black college championship between Grambling College and Florida A & M, and how it fit into the civil rights struggles of the time.

Download or read book Prince Among Slaves written by Terry Alford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An educated, aristocratic slave, Abd Rahman Ibrahima was overseer of the large cotton and tobacco plantation of his master. After more than twenty-five years, when he was finally freed, sixty-six-year-old Ibrahima sailed for Africa with his wife, two sons, and several grandchildren, and died there of fever just five months after his arrival. Prince Among Slaves is the first full account of Ibrahima's life, pieced together from first-person accounts and historical documents. It is not only a remarkable story, but the story of a remarkable man, who endured the humiliation of slavery without ever losing his dignity or his hope for freedom.