Download or read book Breaking Down Barriers written by David W. Levy and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly sixty years, the University of Oklahoma, in obedience to state law, denied admission to African Americans. Only in October 1948 did this racial barrier start to break down, when an elderly teacher named George McLaurin became the first African American to enroll at the university. McLaurin’s case, championed by the NAACP, drew national attention and culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In Breaking Down Barriers, distinguished historian David W. Levy chronicles the historically significant—and at times poignant—story of McLaurin’s two-year struggle to secure his rights. Through exhaustive research, Levy has uncovered as much as we can know about George McLaurin (1887–1968), a notably private person. A veteran educator, he was fully qualified for admission as a graduate student in the university’s School of Education. When the university denied his application, solely on the basis of race, McLaurin received immediate assistance from the NAACP and its lead attorney Thurgood Marshall, who brilliantly defended his case in state and federal courts. On his very first day of class, as Levy details, McLaurin had to sit in a special alcove, separate from the white students in the classroom. Photographs of McLaurin in this humiliating position set off a firestorm of national outrage. Dozens of other African American men and women followed McLaurin to the university, and Levy reviews the many bizarre contortions that university officials had to perform, often against their own inclinations, to accord with the state’s mandate to keep black and white students apart in classrooms, the library, cafeterias and dormitories, and the football stadium. Ultimately, in 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court, swayed by the arguments of Marshall and his co-counsel Robert Carter, ruled in McLaurin’s favor. The decision, as Levy explains, stopped short of toppling the decades-old doctrine of “separate but equal.” But the case led directly to the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally declared that flawed policy unconstitutional.
Download or read book Beyond a Boundary written by Cyril Lionel Robert James and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, the sport is cricket and the scene is the colonial West Indies. Always eloquent and provocative, James--the "black Plato," (as coined by the London Times)--shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play. Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unusual and unexpected game, Beyond a Boundary raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about race, class, politics, and the facts of colonial oppression. Originally published in England in 1963 and in the United States twenty years later (Pantheon, 1983), this second American edition brings back into print this prophetic statement on race and sport in society.
Download or read book Breaking Barriers written by Douglas Stark and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, it is nearly impossible to talk about the best basketball players in America without acknowledging the accomplishments of incredibly talented black athletes like Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant. A little more than a century ago, however, the game was completely dominated by white players playing on segregated courts and teams. In Breaking Barriers: A History of Integration in Professional Basketball, Douglas Stark details the major moments that led to the sport opening its doors to black players. He charts the progress of integration from Bucky Lew—the first black professional basketball player in 1902—to the modern game played by athletes like Stephen Curry and LeBron James. Although Stark focuses on the official integration of basketball in the late 1940s, the story does not end there. Over the past 60-plus years, black athletes have continued to change the game of basketball in terms of style, social progress, and marketability. Spanning the early 1900s to the present day, no other book features such a comprehensive examination of the key events and figures that led to the integration of professional basketball. In Breaking Barriers, these crucial steps in the history of the sport are placed within the larger context of American history, making this book an essential addition to the literature on sports and race in America.
Download or read book Breaking Through Barriers written by Jeanice B Thomas and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever felt like life was beating up on you because you dared to be different or tried to defend what you felt was right? This author describes the painful details from her childhood as she pioneered during the most challenging times of her life-the times when schools in the South were being desegregated. Although the challenges described in this book took place during the Civil Rights Movement, the experiences shared by the author are by no means limited to color barriers. The author shares her story to encourage anyone who may be perceived as different-no matter if they are young or old, tall or short, overweight or not, shy or out-going, or male or female. This book is written for anyone who may be feeling despair because they have been mistreated in life. It is written to encourage you to face life's challenges and to believe that God will give you the strength to break through barriers.
Download or read book Black in Blue written by Carmen Best and published by HarperCollins Leadership. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever your position is on Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, and equity in law enforcement, former police chief Carmen Best shares the leadership lessons she learned as the first Black woman to lead the Seattle Police Department—a personal insider story that will challenge your assumptions on how to move the country forward. Chief Carmen Best has spent the last 28 years as a member of a big-city police force, an institution where minorities and women have historically found it especially difficult to succeed. She defied the odds and became the first Black woman to lead the Seattle Police Department. During her tenure, she was successful in bringing significantly more diversity to the force. However, when the city council cut her budget amid months of protests against police violence, she had no choice but to step aside. Without the city’s support, she felt she wouldn’t be able to continue changing the status quo of the police force from within. Throughout her career, Chief Best has learned lessons that those coming up behind her can benefit from. In this book, she will use her story to share those urgent lessons. Readers will read about: How Chief Best grew up to believe in the change she set out to create. Her early days in the police force, including lessons from the academy and her time on patrol. How she progressed in her career within a primarily white law enforcement culture and the events that led to her becoming Chief. How she built her team and overcame the politics involved in her high-level position until the call for defunding came. Carmen Best teaches readers the core qualities and mindset to persevere and rise through the ranks, even within a workplace whose culture and leadership must be challenged, and policies changed on the way to achieving that vision. Her motivating story serves as a master class in guiding principles for anyone striving to serve their community and rise to the highest echelon of success.
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Download or read book Why I m No Longer Talking to White People About Race written by Reni Eddo-Lodge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak' The book that sparked a national conversation. Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today. THE NO.1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE JHALAK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR A BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD
Download or read book Taliaferro written by Dawn K. Knight and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 2003 I became the first African American head coach of the Indianapolis Colts-fifty years after George had become the Colt's first African American quarterback. Every African American in the NFL today owes a debt of gratitude to George, and I am thrilled that his story is now finally being told." Book jacket.
Download or read book One Righteous Man written by Arthur Browne and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christopher Award and the New York City Book Award Winner of the 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer. When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as “godfather” to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the “Hellfighters of Harlem.” He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department. At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughes’s manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.
Download or read book Baseball s Great Experiment written by Jules Tygiel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a history of African American exclusion from baseball, and assesses the changing racial attitudes that led up to Jackie Robinson's acceptance by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Download or read book Breaking Racial Barriers written by National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution) and published by Pomegranate Communications. This book was released on 1997 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exhibition "Portraits of Out-standing Americans of Negro Origin" premiered in 1944 at the Smithsonian Institution and subsequently toured around the United States for ten years. The purpose of the show, as conceived by its patron, New York's Harmon Foundation, was to recognize and promote the significant achievements of African Americans, encourage racial tolerance among white Americans, and eradicate segregation. In a radical innovation, the foundation commissioned both a black and a white artist, Laura Wheeler Waring and Betsy Graves Reyneau, to create the exhibition's portraits of such notables as Thurgood Marshall, Joe Louis, and Marian Anderson. Breaking Racial Barriers catalogs the 1997 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. A partial reconstruction of the Harmon Foundation's original exhibition, it includes forty-one portraits reproduced in full color, accompanied by biographical text.
Download or read book Vanguard written by Martha S. Jones and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic history of African American women's pursuit of political power -- and how it transformed America. In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women -- Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more -- who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.
Download or read book Silent Thunder written by Leonard W. Miller and published by Red Sea Press(NJ). This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every once in a while, a story comes along that enrages, enlightens and inspires all at once. Silent Thunder, the highly anticipated memoir of legendary auto racing veteran Len Miller is one such story. It offers a rare and surprising inside look at the struggles and triumphs of some of the most courageous men and women in motorsports -- African Americans. Whether you're a racing fan or a black history enthusiast, the author's deeply personal chronicle of his remarkable forty-year career as a manager and owner of African American teams is a gripping testimonial to the empowered underdog in all of us. From inside the pits where resourcefulness defines victory or defeat, to behind the wheel with nothing but the smell of adrenaline and fear, to the plush upholstered offices of corporate sponsors where truth can be treacherous, Silent Thunder is an engrossing read that moves at lightening speed. The author also shares fascinating behind-the-scenes anecdotes featuring such names as Howard Cosell, Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti, Skip Barber, Clarence Thomas, Malcolm Durham, Wendell Scott, Linda Lovelace, Don King, and many others. Len Miller's narrative acumen is eclipsed only by his engrossing honesty. Silent Thunder is a compelling window into the resiliency of the human spirit in the face of injustice, humiliation, and even cruelty. Yet, while it exposes the underbelly of racism and elitism in one of America's most beloved sports, it also celebrates the hope and possibility for change. Book jacket.
Download or read book Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock n Roll written by Peter Guralnick and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography: Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.
Download or read book The Forgotten First written by Keyshawn Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unknown story of the Black pioneers who collectively changed the face of the NFL in 1946.
Download or read book Charlie Takes His Shot written by Nancy Churnin and published by Albert Whitman & Company. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2018 Eureka! Nonfiction Children's Book Honor Award, presented by the California Reading Association When the rules kept Charlie Sifford from playing in the Professional Golf Association, he set out to change them. Charlie Sifford loved golf, but in the 1930's only white people were allowed to play in the Professional Golf Association. Sifford had won plenty of Black tournaments, but he was determined to break the color barrier in the PGA. In 1960 he did, only to face discrimination from hotels that wouldn't rent him rooms and clubs that wouldn't let him use the same locker as the white players. But Sifford kept playing, becoming the first Black golfer to win a PGA tournament and eventually ranking among the greats in golf.
Download or read book The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America written by Richard Rothstein and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
