Download or read book The Black Cabinet written by Jill Watts and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth history exploring the evolution, impact, and ultimate demise of what was known in the 1930s and ‘40s as FDR’s Black Cabinet. In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. As the New Deal began, a “black Brain Trust” joined the administration and began documenting and addressing the economic hardship and systemic inequalities African Americans faced. They became known as the Black Cabinet, but the environment they faced was reluctant, often hostile, to change. “Will the New Deal be a square deal for the Negro?” The black press wondered. The Black Cabinet set out to devise solutions to the widespread exclusion of black people from its programs, whether by inventing tools to measure discrimination or by calling attention to the administration’s failures. Led by Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, they were instrumental to Roosevelt’s continued success with black voters. Operating mostly behind the scenes, they helped push Roosevelt to sign an executive order that outlawed discrimination in the defense industry. They saw victories?jobs and collective agriculture programs that lifted many from poverty?and defeats?the bulldozing of black neighborhoods to build public housing reserved only for whites; Roosevelt’s refusal to get behind federal anti-lynching legislation. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition from the president, and with his death, it disappeared from view. But it had changed history. Eventually, one of its members would go on to be the first African American Cabinet secretary; another, the first African American federal judge and mentor to Thurgood Marshall. Masterfully researched and dramatically told, The Black Cabinet brings to life a forgotten generation of leaders who fought post-Reconstruction racial apartheid and whose work served as a bridge that Civil Rights activists traveled to achieve the victories of the 1950s and ’60s. Praise for The Black Cabinet “A dramatic piece of nonfiction that recovers the history of a generation of leaders that helped create the environment for the civil rights battles in decades that followed Roosevelt’s death.” —Library Journal “Fascinating . . . revealing the hidden figures of a ‘brain trust’ that lobbied, hectored and strong-armed President Franklin Roosevelt to cut African Americans in on the New Deal. . . . Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Black Cabinet is sprawling and epic, and Watts deftly re-creates whole scenes from archival material.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
Download or read book The Black Cabinet written by Jill Watts and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency with the help of key African American defectors from the Republican Party. At the time, most African Americans lived in poverty in the South, denied citizenship rights and terrorized by white violence. But Roosevelt's victory created the opportunity for a group of African American intellectuals and activists to join his administration as racial affairs experts. Known as the Black Cabinet, they organized themselves into an unofficial council. They innovated antidiscrimination policy, documented the New Deal's inequalities, led programs that lifted people out of poverty and paved the way for greater federal accountability to African Americans and a greater black presence in government. But the Black Cabinet never won official recognition from Roosevelt, and with his death, it disappeared from history. This is its story"--
Download or read book The President s Kitchen Cabinet written by Adrian Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work—Non Fiction James Beard award–winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history. Daisy McAfee Bonner, for example, FDR's cook at his Warm Springs retreat, described the president's final day on earth in 1945, when he was struck down just as his lunchtime cheese souffle emerged from the oven. Sorrowfully, but with a cook's pride, she recalled, "He never ate that souffle, but it never fell until the minute he died." A treasury of information about cooking techniques and equipment, the book includes twenty recipes for which black chefs were celebrated. From Samuel Fraunces's "onions done in the Brazilian way" for George Washington to Zephyr Wright's popovers, beloved by LBJ's family, Miller highlights African Americans' contributions to our shared American foodways. Surveying the labor of enslaved people during the antebellum period and the gradual opening of employment after Emancipation, Miller highlights how food-related work slowly became professionalized and the important part African Americans played in that process. His chronicle of the daily table in the White House proclaims a fascinating new American story.
Download or read book The Black Cabinet written by Patricia Wentworth and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chloe Dane inherits a fabled ancestral estate—and plunges into deadly danger—in this novel of romance and suspense from the author of the acclaimed Miss Silver Mysteries The lowly assistant to a London dressmaker, Chloe Dane yearns for a new life. She has bittersweet memories of being a carefree child playing hide-and-seek at Danesborough, her family’s magnificent country estate. Decades later, the ancestral mansion has been restored to its former glory—and Chloe is shocked to discover that she is the sole heir. Danesborough is not the sun-filled, evergreen place she remembers. The trees are bare and the house is shrouded in mist. But the enormous gold-and-black lacquered Chinese cabinet in the drawing room is exactly the same. Chloe’s childhood imagination created an entire story out of the intricate carvings on the cabinet: a flowing river filled with boats and fishermen and one frightening man she called Mr. Dark. But now, as Chloe begins to uncover Mitchell Dane’s true motives for bequeathing her the centuries-old manse, she has a very real reason to be afraid: The truth about what’s hidden in the black cabinet will soon threaten her life.
Download or read book The Cabinet written by Lindsay M. Chervinsky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US Constitution never established a presidential cabinet—the delegates to the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected the idea. So how did George Washington create one of the most powerful bodies in the federal government? On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries—Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph—for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own. Faced with diplomatic crises, domestic insurrections, and constitutional challenges—and finding congressional help lacking—Washington decided he needed a group of advisors he could turn to. He modeled his new cabinet on the councils of war he had led as commander of the Continental Army. In the early days, the cabinet served at the president’s pleasure. Washington tinkered with its structure throughout his administration, at times calling regular meetings, at other times preferring written advice and individual discussions. Lindsay M. Chervinsky reveals the far-reaching consequences of Washington’s choice. The tensions in the cabinet between Hamilton and Jefferson heightened partisanship and contributed to the development of the first party system. And as Washington faced an increasingly recalcitrant Congress, he came to treat the cabinet as a private advisory body to summon as needed, greatly expanding the role of the president and the executive branch.
Download or read book Knocking Down Barriers written by Truman Kella Gibson and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-07 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award Certificate of Excellence Recipient, 2007 Hyde Park Historical Society Paul Cornell Award Knocking Down Barriers is the memoir of a life spent making a difference. In 1940, when Truman Gibson reported for duty at the War Department, Washington was like a southern city in its seemingly unalterable segregation and oppressive summer heat. Gibson had no illusions about the nation’s racism, but as a Chicagoan who’d enjoyed the best of the vibrant Black culture of prewar America, he was shocked to find the worst of the Jim Crow South in the capital. What Gibson accomplished as an advocate for African American soldiers—first as a lawyer working for the secretary of war, then as a member of Harry S. Truman’s “Black cabinet”—fueled the struggle for civil rights in the American military. A University of Chicago Law School graduate, Gibson took his fight for racial justice to the corridors of power, arguing against restrictive real estate covenants before the US Supreme Court, opposing such iconic military figures as Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George C. Marshall to demand the integration of the armed forces, and challenging white control of professional sports by creating a boxing empire that made television history. Filled with firsthand details and little-known stories about key advancements in race relations in the worlds of law, the military, sports, and entertainment, Gibson’s memoir is also an engaging recollection of encounters with the likes of Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Patton, Jackie Robinson, and Joe Louis. Winner of the 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award Certificate of Excellence, Knocking Down Barriers illuminates social milestones that continue to shape race in the United States today.
Download or read book The Woman Behind the New Deal written by Kirstin Downey and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kirstin Downey’s lively, substantive and—dare I say—inspiring new biography of Perkins . . . not only illuminates Perkins’ career but also deepens the known contradictions of Roosevelt’s character.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closest friends and the first female secretary of labor, Perkins capitalized on the president’s political savvy and popularity to enact most of the Depression-era programs that are today considered essential parts of the country’s social safety network.
Download or read book Ilf and Petrov s American Road Trip written by Илья Ильф and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1935, well into the era of Soviet communism, Russian satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov came to the U.S as special correspondents for the Russian newspaper Pravda. They drove cross-country and back on a ten-week trip, recording images of American life through humerous texts and the lens of a Leica camera. When they returned home, they published their work in Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Time magazine, and later in the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storied America). This wonderful lost workfilled with wry observations, biting opinions, and telling photographsis now collected in Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, the first English translation. From Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: "The word 'America' has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares. We want to change that image." A Cabinet Book published by Princeton Architectural Press
Download or read book The Best People written by Alexander Nazaryan and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing look at the Trump cabinet: the scandals, the incompetence, the assault on the federal government, the bungled attempts to impose order on an administration lost in a chaos of its own making. Donald Trump promised a return to national greatness, but each day of his presidency seems to bring a new crisis, a deepening sense of national unease. Why, and how, has he failed his supporters? And how has he, on occasion, bested his detractors? The Best People takes complete measure of the Trump administration, to grasp with clarity the president and his intentions, and how those intentions are being carried out-or subverted-by the people he has hired. Alexander Nazaryan argues that the "assault on the administrative state" promised by Steve Bannon in early 2017 never came. What the American people got instead was Wilbur Ross hauling his tennis pro to confirmation hearing preparations; Scott Pruitt running away from rattlesnakes; Reince Priebus enduring insults from junior White House staffers. And yet, bungling as Trump's cabinet members have been, they have managed to either damage or arrest many of the gears that make government run. They have given away public lands to oil companies and allowed corporate lobbyists to make decisions about what is best for the American people, and have done it all while flying on private jets and dining at the finest restaurants, at taxpayers' expense. Meticulously reported and enthrallingly told, The Best People takes readers inside the federal government under Trump's control, a government assailed by the very people charged to lead it, a government awash in confusion and corruption.
Download or read book The Filing Cabinet written by Craig Robertson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.
Download or read book Mae West written by Jill Watts and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-17 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend? Sifting through previously untapped sources, author Jill Watts unravels the enigmatic life of Mae West, tracing her early years spent in the Brooklyn subculture of boxers and underworld figures, and follows her journey through burlesque, vaudeville, Broadway and, finally, Hollywood, where she quickly became one of the big screen's most popular--and colorful--stars. Exploring West's penchant for contradiction and her carefully perpetuated paradoxes, Watts convincingly argues that Mae West borrowed heavily from African American culture, music, dance and humor, creating a subversive voice for herself by which she artfully challenged society and its assumptions regarding race, class and gender. Viewing West as a trickster, Watts demonstrates that by appropriating for her character the black tradition of double-speak and "signifying," West also may have hinted at her own African-American ancestry and the phenomenon of a black woman passing for white. This absolutely fascinating study is the first comprehensive, interpretive account of Mae West's life and work. It reveals a beloved icon as a radically subversive artist consciously creating her own complex image.
Download or read book The Cabinet written by Un-su Kim and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize. Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat. A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert File Under: Fiction [ 12,000 Cans of Beer | Memory Mosaicers | Will Execution Inc. | Monkey of All Bombs ]
Download or read book Black and Blue written by Paul Frymer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline. The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement. From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
Download or read book Eugene Kinckle Jones written by Felix L. Armfield and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading African American intellectual, Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1954) was instrumental in professionalizing black social work in America. Jones used his position was executive secretary of the National Urban League to work with social reformers advocating on behalf of African Americans and against racial discrimination. He also led the Urban League's efforts at campaigning for equal hiring practices and the inclusion of black workers in labor unions, and promoted the importance of vocational training and social work. Drawing on interviews with Jones's colleagues and associates, as well as recently opened family and Urban League archives, Felix L. Armfield blends biography with an in-depth discussion of the roles of black institutions and organizations. The result is a work that offers new details on the growth of African American communities, the evolution of African American life, and the role of black social workers in the years before the civil rights era.
Download or read book The Police Shooting of Mark Duggan written by Forensic Architecture and published by . This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the evening of 4 August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in the north London neighborhood of Tottenham after the minicab in which he was traveling was pulled over by a team of undercover officers. The team had begun following Duggan shortly after receiving intelligence that he was in possession of a gun, and the officer who shot him testified that he had seen, for a "split second," Duggan aiming the gun at him after he had exited the minicab. However, the gun was not found next to Duggan's body on the pavement. According to the police, they discovered it in a patch of grass some seven meters away.After a coroner's inquest ruled Duggan's killing "lawful" and the police watchdog organization issued a report siding with the officers' version of events, the Duggan family's legal team commissioned Forensic Architecture to conduct an investigation into the critical question at the heart of the case: How did the gun end up in the grass? With no video footage of the shooting itself, Forensic Architecture had to rely primarily on the written and oral testimony of the officers involved to develop a spatial investigation designed to test the plausibility of the police's narrative and to examine whether the officers themselves could have planted the gun.In addition to detailing the methodologies employed and conclusions reached by Forensic Architecture, this volume offers a selection of the primary documents used for the investigation; an introduction by EyalWeizman, director of Forensic Architecture, analyzing the notions of "pre-emption" and "split-second decision making," which are often invoked to defend police killingsof Black people; a roundtable with scholar Adam Elliott-Cooper, activists Temi Mwale and Stafford Scott, and attorney Marcia Willis Stewart on the complex colonial and legal histories that have shaped the policing of Black Britons in the postwar era; and the transcript of a speech by Scott on the struggle for justice for those who have died as a result of racialized policing.
Download or read book First Class written by Alison Stewart and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining a fascinating history of the first U.S. high school for African Americans with an unflinching analysis of urban public-school education today, First Class explores an underrepresented and largely unknown aspect of black history while opening a discussion on what it takes to make a public school successful. In 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, citizens of Washington, DC, opened the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, the first black public high school in the United States; it would later be renamed Dunbar High and would flourish despite Jim Crow laws and segregation. Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty: its early principal was the first black graduate of Harvard, and at a time it had seven teachers with PhDs, a medical doctor, and a lawyer. During the school's first 80 years, these teachers would develop generations of highly educated, successful African Americans, and at its height in the 1940s and '50s, Dunbar High School sent 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as in too many failing urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students are barely proficient in reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart—whose parents were both Dunbar graduates—tells the story of the school's rise, fall, and possible resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.
Download or read book Damn Near White written by Carolyn Marie Wilkins and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carolyn Wilkins grew up defending her racial identity. Because of her light complexion and wavy hair, she spent years struggling to convince others that she was black. Her family’s prominence set Carolyn’s experiences even further apart from those of the average African American. Her father and uncle were well-known lawyers who had graduated from Harvard Law School. Another uncle had been a child prodigy and protégé of Albert Einstein. And her grandfather had been America's first black assistant secretary of labor. Carolyn's parents insisted she follow the color-conscious rituals of Chicago's elite black bourgeoisie—experiences Carolyn recalls as some of the most miserable of her entire life. Only in the company of her mischievous Aunt Marjory, a woman who refused to let the conventions of “proper” black society limit her, does Carolyn feel a true connection to her family's African American heritage. When Aunt Marjory passes away, Carolyn inherits ten bulging scrapbooks filled with family history and memories. What she finds in these photo albums inspires her to discover the truth about her ancestors—a quest that will eventually involve years of research, thousands of miles of travel, and much soul-searching. Carolyn learns that her great-grandfather John Bird Wilkins was born into slavery and went on to become a teacher, inventor, newspaperman, renegade Baptist minister, and a bigamist who abandoned five children. And when she discovers that her grandfather J. Ernest Wilkins may have been forced to resign from his labor department post by members of the Eisenhower administration, Carolyn must confront the bittersweet fruits of her family's generations-long quest for status and approval. Damn Near White is an insider’s portrait of an unusual American family. Readers will be drawn into Carolyn’s journey as she struggles to redefine herself in light of the long-buried secrets she uncovers. Tackling issues of class, color, and caste, Wilkins reflects on the changes of African American life in U.S. history through her dedicated search to discover her family’s powerful story.
