How Black Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used media to prove their equality, not only in the eyes of God but in society. The institutional structures of white supremacy—slavery, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, and mass incarceration—require a commonsense belief that black people lack the moral and intellectual capacities of white people. It is through this lens of belief that racial exclusions have been justified and reproduced in the United States. Televised Redemption...
John Brown is usually remembered as a terrorist whose unbridled hatred of slavery drove him to the ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Tried and executed for seizing the arsenal and attempting to spur a liberation movement among the slaves, Brown was the ultimate cause celebre for a country on the brink of civil war. “Fire from the Midst of You” situates Brown within the religious and social context of a nation steeped in racism, showing his roots in...
Explores the life of Shields Green, one of the black men who followed John Brown to Harper’s Ferry in 1859 When John Brown decided to raid the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry as the starting point of his intended liberation effort in the South, some closest to him thought it was unnecessary and dangerous. Frederick Douglass, a pioneering abolitionist, refused Brown’s invitation to join him in Virginia, believing that the raid on the armory was a suicide mission. Yet in front of Douglass,...
Fresh off the heels of W. Kamau Bell’s profile, The Gullah of South Carolina on CNN’s United Shades of America comes this fascinating look at the history of Gullah people on Hilton Head Island. Many readers will recognize Hilton Head as a golf and beach resort and so may be intrigued at its history as stronghold of the unique Gullah culture. This book will be popular all along the mid-Atlantic coast, where Gullah people reside on the many sea islands. The CNN programming also indicates a...
This is the first modern publication of ten essays published in the popular Boston newspaper The Independent Chronicle, a significant intellectual event in Massachusetts politics.The essays deal primarily with the problem of mixed government in a republic. Lincoln writes, “Two distinct and different orders of men seems incident to every society,” and these “two contending interests,” fed by a “spirit of jealousy and distrust,” would always be in dispute with one another. “Whether the parties to...
