Archives Of The Federal Writers Project Alabama Illinois Reels 1 9

Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.

The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again. No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America. Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice). With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.

This book reviews the history of the Highlander Folk School (Summerfield, Tennessee) and describes school programs that were developed to support Black and White southerners involved in social change. The Highlander Folk School was a small, residential adult education institution founded in 1932. The first section of the book provides background information on Myles Horton, the founder of the school, and on circumstances that led him to establish the school. Horton's experience growing up in the South, as well as his educational experience as a sociology and theology student, served to strengthen his dedication to democratic social change through education. The next four sections of the book describe the programs developed during the school's 30-year history, including educational programs for the unemployed and impoverished residents of Cumberland Mountain during the Great Depression; for new leaders in the southern industrial union movement during its critical period; for groups of small farmers when the National Farmers Union sought to organize in the South; and for adult and student leadership in the emerging civil rights movement. Horton's pragmatic leadership allowed educational programs to evolve in order to meet community needs. For example, Highlander's civil rights programs began with a workshop on school desegregation and evolved more broadly to prepare volunteers from civil rights groups to teach "citizenship schools," where Blacks could learn basic literacy skills needed to pass voter registration tests. Beginning in 1958, and until the school's charter was revoked and its property confiscated by the State of Tennessee in 1961, the school was under mounting attacks by highly-placed government leaders and others because of its support of the growing civil rights movement. Contains 270 references, chapter notes, and an index. (LP)

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.