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Buffalo State Administrators, Faculty Share Literature Picks That Speak to Black Experience
by Ken Fujiuchi on 2022-03-08T10:44:00-05:00 in African & African American, English Language and Literature | 0 CommentsIn honor of this year’s Black History Month, African American administrators and faculty members from Buffalo State College shared a favorite book that speaks to the Black experience.
Katherine Conway-Turner
President of Buffalo State College
Wench by
Call Number: PS3616.E7484 W46 2010
ISBN: 9780061706561
Publication Date: 2011-01-25
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known facts, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones's The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War.
Bus Ride to Justice (Revised Edition) by
Call Number: KF373 .G63 2021
ISBN: 9781588384515
Publication Date: 2021-01-12
First published in 1995, Bus Ride to Justice, the best-selling autobiography by acclaimed civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray, appears now in a newly revised edition that updates Gray's remarkable career of "destroying everything segregated that I could find." Of particular interest will be the details Gray reveals for the first time about Rosa Parks's 1955 arrest. Gray was the young lawyer for Parks and also Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott after Parks's arrest. As the last survivor of that inner circle, Gray speaks about the strategic reasons Parks was presented as a demure, random victim of Jim Crow policies when in reality she was a committed, strong-willed activist who was willing to be arrested so there could be a test case to challenge segregation laws. Gray's remarkable career also includes landmark civil rights cases in voting rights, education, housing, employment, law enforcement, jury selection, and more. He is widely considered one of the most successful civil rights attorneys of the twentieth century and his cases are studied in law schools around the world. In addition, he was an ordained Church of Christ minister and was one of the first blacks elected to the Alabama legislature in the modern era. Initially denied entrance to Alabama's segregated law school, he eventually became the first black president of the Alabama bar association.
The New Jim Crow by
Call Number: HV9950 .A437 2020
ISBN: 9781620971932
Publication Date: 2020-01-07
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'
Civil Rights History from the Ground Up by
Whistling Vivaldi by
The Wake of the Wind by
Spare the Kids by
The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself by
Mirror to America by
The Fire Next Time by
Call Number: E185.615 .C5844 2011
ISBN: 9780820338651
Publication Date: 2011-03-30
After decades of scholarship on the civil rights movement at the local level, the insights of bottom-up movement history remain essentially invisible in the accepted narrative of the movement and peripheral to debates on how to research, document, and teach about the movement. This collection of original works refocuses attention on this bottom-up history and compels a rethinking of what and who we think is central to the movement. The essays examine such locales as Sunflower County, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Wilson, North Carolina; and engage such issues as nonviolence and self-defense, the implications of focusing on women in the movement, and struggles for freedom beyond voting rights and school desegregation. Events and incidents discussed range from the movement's heyday to the present and include the Poor People's Campaign mule train to Washington, D.C., the popular response to the deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and political cartoons addressing Barack Obama's presidential campaign. The kinds of scholarship represented here--which draw on oral history and activist insights (along with traditional sources) and which bring the specificity of time and place into dialogue with broad themes and a national context--are crucial as we continue to foster scholarly debates, evaluate newer conceptual frameworks, and replace the superficial narrative that persists in the popular imagination.
Timothy Gordon
Vice President for Student Affairs
Whistling Vivaldi by
Call Number: HM1096 .S736 2010
ISBN: 9780393339727
Publication Date: 2011-04-04
Claude M. Steele, who has been called "one of the few great social psychologists," offers a vivid first-person account of the research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these "stereotype threats" and reshaping American identities.
Crystal Rodriguez-Dabney
Chief of Staff and Chief Diversity Officer
The Wake of the Wind by
Call Number: PS3553.O5874 W35 1998
ISBN: 9780385487054
Publication Date: 1999-12-28
A dramatic and thought-provoking novel of one family's triumph in the face of the hardships and challenges of the post-Civil War South. The Wake of the Wind, J. California Cooper's third novel, is her most penetrating look yet at the challenges that generations of African Americans have had to overcome in order to carve out a home for themselves and their families. Set in Texas in the waning years of the Civil War, the novel tells the dramatic story of a remarkable heroine, Lifee, and her husband, Mor. When Emancipation finally comes to Texas, Mor, Lifee, and the extended family they create from other slaves who are also looking for a home and a future, set out in search of a piece of land they can call their own. In the face of constant threats, they manage not only to survive but to succeed--their crops grow, their children thrive, they educate themselves and others. Lifee and Mor pass their intelligence, determination, and talents along to their children, the next generation to surge forward. At once tragic and triumphant, this is an epic story that captures with extraordinary authenticity the most important struggle of the last hundred years.
Yanick Jenkins
Director of Buffalo State’s Educational Opportunity Program
Spare the Kids by
Call Number: E185.86 .P336 2017
ISBN: 9780807061046
Publication Date: 2017-03-21
A challenge to the cultural tradition of corporal punishment in Black homes and its connections to racial violence in America Why do so many African Americans have such a special attachment to whupping children? Studies show that nearly 80 percent of black parents see spanking, popping, pinching, and beating as reasonable, effective ways to teach respect and to protect black children from the streets, incarceration, encounters with racism, or worse. However, the consequences of this widely accepted approach to child-rearing are far-reaching and seldom discussed. Dr. Stacey Patton's extensive research suggests that corporal punishment is a crucial factor in explaining why black folks are subject to disproportionately higher rates of school suspensions and expulsions, criminal prosecutions, improper mental health diagnoses, child abuse cases, and foster care placements, which too often funnel abused and traumatized children into the prison system. Weaving together race, religion, history, popular culture, science, policing, psychology, and personal testimonies, Dr. Patton connects what happens at home to what happens in the streets in a way that is thought-provoking, unforgettable, and deeply sobering. Spare the Kids is not just a book. It is part of a growing national movement to provide positive, nonviolent discipline practices to those rearing, teaching, and caring for children of color.
The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by
Call Number: Curriculum Materials Lab PZ7.1.H36378 Bo 2021
ISBN: 9780593307359
Publication Date: 2021-11-16
The 1619 Project's lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States, thoughtfully rendered by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery honor-winning author Renée Watson. A young student receives a family tree assignment in school, but she can only trace back three generations. Grandma gathers the whole family, and the student learns that 400 years ago, in 1619, their ancestors were stolen and brought to America by white slave traders. But before that, they had a home, a land, a language. She learns how the people said to be born on the water survived. And the people planted dreams and hope, willed themselves to keep living, living. And the people learned new words for love for friend for family for joy for grow for home. With powerful verse and striking illustrations by Nikkolas Smith, Born on the Water provides a pathway for readers of all ages to reflect on the origins of American identity.
Steve Peraza
Assistant Professor, History and Social Studies Education Department
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself by
ISBN: 9781781394366
Publication Date: 2014-11-06
Douglass' powerful account of his journey from slave, by way of determined self education, to being one of America's great statesmen and orators. Published in 1845, this little book was widely read by the general public in the North who knew little about the inner workings of slavery. It was favorably reviewed in the New York Tribune: "Considered merely as narrative, we have never read one more simple, true, coherent and warm with genuine feeling", and it had a great influence in public opinion across the Atlantic: "Taking all together, not less than one million of persons in Great Britain and Ireland have been excited by the book and its commentators." Also available in hardback: 978-1-78139-437-3.
Ron Stewart
Professor and Chair, Sociology Department
Mirror to America by
Call Number: E175.5.F73 A3 2005
ISBN: 9780374530471
Publication Date: 2006-10-31
John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller,From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened--once with lynching--and consistently subjected to racism's denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago's history department and,later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world's most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin's participation was much more fundamental than that. From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President's Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation for arguingBrown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory,Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.
Marcus Watson
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies and Individualized Studies
The Fire Next Time by
Call Number: E185.61 .B195 1995
ISBN: 9780679744726
Publication Date: 1992-12-01
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation, gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement--and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. "Basically the finest essay I've ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." --Ta-Nehisi Coates At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document from the iconic author of If Beale Street Could Talk and Go Tell It on the Mountain. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of literature.
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