Books like The choice by Samuel F. Yette

Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 epistolary book The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against. The novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates filled an intellectual gap in succession to James Baldwin. Editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as exceptional. The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Alexander's central premise, from which the book derives its title, is that "mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow". --wikipedia

Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. “A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.” —Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review “Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.” —Time

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a thousand individuals, and gained access to new data and offical records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. - Back cover.

First published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters was a national best-seller, and it has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America. Race Matters contains West’s most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

In 1897 a young sociologist who was already marked as a scholar of the highest promise submitted to the American Association of Political and Social Sciences a "plan for the study of the Negro problem". The product of that plan was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), Ph.D. from Harvard (class of 1890), was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct in-depth studies on the Negro community in Philadelphia. The provost of the university was interested and sympathetic, but DuBois knew early on that white interest and sympathy were far from enough. He knew that scholarship was itself a great weapon in the Negro's struggle for a decent life. The Philadelphia Negro was originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1899. One of the first works to combine the use of urban ethnography, social history, and descriptive statistics, it has become a classic work in the social science literature. Both the issues the book raises and the evolution of DuBois's own thinking about the problems of black integration into American society sound strikingly contemporary. Among the intriguing aspects of The Philadelphia Negro are what it says about the author, about race in urban America and about social science at the time, but even more important is the fact that many of DuBois's observations can be made - in fact are being made - by investigators today. In his introduction to this edition, Elijah Anderson traces DuBois's life before his move to Philadelphia. He then examines how the neighborhood studied by DuBois has changed over the years, and he compares thestatus of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.

"This anthology of black writers traces the evolution of African-American perspectives throughout American history, from the early years of slavery to the end of the 20th century. The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history." "The selections represent a broad spectrum of ideology. Conservative, radical, nationalistic, and integrationist approaches can be found in almost every period, yet there have been striking shifts in the evolution of social thought and activism. The editors judiciously illustrate how both continuity and change affected the African-American community in terms of its internal divisions, class structure, migration, social problems, leadership, and protest movements. They also show how gender, spirituality, literature, music, and connections to Africa and the Caribbean played a prominent role in black life and history."--BOOK JACKET.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region. Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."

Race and Democracy is the first history of the civil rights movement in Louisiana. Central to Race and Democracy is Fairclough's argument that historians and the media, in their fascination with the action-oriented, youth-dominated 1960s, do not appreciate the full variety, depth, and durability of black protest. Moreover, by according higher visibility to the most "glamorous" aspects of the movement, they have neglected the crucial role of the NAACP. The dominant civil rights organization in the deep south before the mid-1950s, the NAACP had already amassed an impressive record of victories through litigation and fieldwork before SCLC, CORE, and SNCC arrived on the scene. In reassessing the role of the NAACP, Race and Democracy highlights the contributions of black lawyer Alexander Pierre Tureaud and the many extraordinarily brave men and women for whom the struggle for civil rights was a lifetime commitment. . Race and Democracy includes careful analyses of white responses to the civil rights movement as expressed through political factions, trade unions, business lobbies, the Catholic Church, White Citizens Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan. As well as examining the leadership of three powerful governors - Huey Long, Earl Long, and John McKeithen - it describes the roles of such key individuals as federal judge Skelly Wright, Catholic archbishop Joseph Rummel, and racist politico Leander H. Perez. Throughout, Fairclough places the Louisiana movement in the context of such national trends and events as war, depression, McCarthyism, Black Power, and federal intervention. He concludes by surveying present-day Louisiana and assessing the political significance of David Duke.

"Randall Robinson makes a case for the enormous debt America owes to Africans and African Americans for the incalculable damage blacks have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of nearly two hundred and fifty years of slavery and segregation.". "In Robinson's view, America must accept responsibility for the grievous wrong that has been committed against Africans and African Americans, and take steps to redress that wrong: and black Americans need to arm themselves with a more comprehensive awareness of their ancient history and a fuller recognition of their ongoing contribution to our nation and the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Piercingly intuitive, eloquent, and caustic, *Affirmative Acts* is an address to the social, economic, racial, and political conflicts that mar the otherwise beautiful human experience. In this new collection of political essays, Jordan explores the confusion of an America in the grip of pseudo-multiculturalism and political intolerance. Continuing in the tradition of her classic collections *Civil Wars* and *Technical Difficulties*, Jordan acquaints readers with moments of American life threatened by social negligence and economic despair. With her characteristic insight, Jordan unveils how these too-frequent bouts of civil unrest bring out the weakest parts of the American spirit and challenges readers to remain inspired as society approaches the millennium. June Jordan's wisdom shines through in this brilliant collection of inspirational essays, which will be eagerly awaited by Jordan loyalists and enjoyed by her new readers.

"This is James Baldwin's long-awaited statement on what has happened to America through the political and social agonies of her recent history".

John Higham and The Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies have brought together nine original essays - plus a tenth already published essay that deserves to be more widely known. Together these essays offer the most compactly comprehensive appraisal we have of how the modern civil rights movement came about, how it changed relationships between blacks and whites, and how it led to affirmative action, to multiculturalism, and eventually to the present stalemate and discontent.