Invisible Invincible Black Women Growing Up In Bronzeville

As a young lad visiting Jackson, Mississippi, during many summers, Portia sat on the front porch and listened intently as her great-grandmother and grandmother told stories of perseverance, triumph, blessings, and strength. This experience and the richness of their recollection of love and family while also enduring the obstacles of oppression and segregation shaped the fiber of who she is. A full understanding of her identity and knowledge of family history kept her strong and resilient and gave her a foundation for survival to weather any storm. Portia was born at the very beginning of the civil rights era to parents who migrated from the South, and she was a teenager at the height of the 60s movement. This incredible and insightful next generation story you will read, Invisible, Invincible Black Women Growing Up in Bronzeville, is a combination of history that has been handed down along with an eyewitness account of the things Portia saw during and after the Great Migration to the north. Portia is a woman of compassion, vulnerability, toughness, and wisdom; this combination makes some see her as complex at first glance. She is a trailblazer for positive change and has a keen discernment of people. After many sacrifices for others, Portia completed her bachelors and masters degrees in education. She is currently an adjunct professional and is a special education teacher with the State Board of Education. Portias work as a student learning advocate has been featured in the local newspapers. The end goal of the book and its story is to remind anyone that you can overcome and survive and know that, amid any and all the broken dreams in life, you can still achieve your life mission and have happiness and contentment.

As a young lad visiting Jackson, Mississippi, during many summers, Portia sat on the front porch and listened intently as her great-grandmother and grandmother told stories of perseverance, triumph, blessings, and strength. This experience and the richness of their recollection of love and family while also enduring the obstacles of oppression and segregation shaped the fiber of who she is. A full understanding of her identity and knowledge of family history kept her strong and resilient and gave her a foundation for survival to weather any storm.Portia was born at the very beginning of the civil rights era to parents who migrated from the South, and she was a teenager at the height of the '60s movement. This incredible and insightful next generation story you will read, Invisible, Invincible Black Women Growing Up in Bronzeville, is a combination of history that has been handed down along with an eyewitness account of the things Portia saw during and after the Great Migration to the north.Portia is a woman of compassion, vulnerability, toughness, and wisdom; this combination makes some see her as complex at first glance. She is a trailblazer for positive change and has a keen discernment of people.After many sacrifices for others, Portia completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in education. She is currently an adjunct professional and is a special education teacher with the State Board of Education. Portia's work as a student learning advocate has been featured in the local newspapers.The end goal of the book and its story is to remind anyone that you can overcome and survive and know that, amid any and all the broken dreams in life, you can still achieve your life mission and have happiness and contentment.

Hugel-Marshall is the daughter of a Bavarian woman and an African- American soldier she didn't meet until many years later. Left at age 7 in an orphanage, where she was taken to have the "black demon" exorcised from her, Hugel-Marshall tells of her long struggle to come to terms with life as a German among people who seemed determined to disavow her existence. In her late 30s, she began to meet other Afro-Germans and explore her identity. A friend of the writer Audre Lord, she eventually published a number of works on anti-racist education. Her memoir is punctuated with snippets of poetry and illustrated with family snapshots. (The work has no index.) Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.

“A stirring, accessible introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks and a must-have for all elementary collections.” —School Library Journal (Starred review) “The combination of biography and Brooks' own poems makes for a strong, useful, and beautiful text . . . A solid introduction to a brilliant writer”—Kirkus. Acclaimed writer Alice Faye Duncan tells the story of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. SING a song for Gwendolyn Brooks. Sing it loud—a Chicago blues. With a voice both wise and witty, Gwendolyn Brooks crafted poems that captured the urban Black experience and the role of women in society. She grew up on the South Side of Chicago, reading and writing constantly from a young age, her talent lovingly nurtured by her parents. Brooks ultimately published 20 books of poetry, two autobiographies, and one novel. Alice Faye Duncan has created her own song to celebrate Gwendolyn’s life and work, illuminating the tireless struggle of revision and the sweet reward of success.

Traces the movement from mutualism to individualism in the context of American family life. Families survived or even flourished during colonization, Revolution, slavery, immigration and economic upheaval. In the past century, prosperity created a culture devoted to pleasure and individual fulfilment.

“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.