Jim Crow Also Lived Here

Many people believe that racism and discrimination against those of African descent was primarily an American experience. However, this book dispels that myth by recounting Leonard Albert Paris’s first eighteen years (1948–1966), growing up as a Black youth in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, a province that was at the time, home to about 36 percent of Canada’s Black population. Structural racism, community isolation, and generational poverty affected every aspect of his life, creating challenges and misery for him, his family, and the entire Black community—an experience that continues to affect him emotionally many decades later. While not as extreme as it was during the author’s formative years, racism and its effects continue into the present. Leonard wrote Jim Crow Also Lived Here in part to create awareness of this problem and also to inspire change.

Many people believe that racism and discrimination against those of African descent was primarily an American experience. However, this book dispels that myth by recounting Leonard Albert Paris's first eighteen years (1948-1966), growing up as a Black youth in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, a province that was at the time, home to about 36 percent of Canada's Black population. Structural racism, community isolation, and generational poverty affected every aspect of his life, creating challenges and misery for him, his family, and the entire Black community-an experience that continues to affect him emotionally many decades later. While not as extreme as it was during the author's formative years, racism and its effects continue into the present. Leonard wrote Jim Crow Also Lived Here in part to create awareness of this problem and also to inspire change....

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism—building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.

For many people, especially those who came of age after landmark civil rights legislation was passed, it is difficult to understand what it was like to be an African American living under Jim Crow segregation in the United States. Most young Americans have little or no knowledge about restrictive covenants, literacy tests, poll taxes, lynchings, and other oppressive features of the Jim Crow racial hierarchy. Even those who have some familiarity with the period may initially view racist segregation and injustices as mere relics of a distant, shameful past. A proper understanding of race relations in this country must include a solid knowledge of Jim Crow—how it emerged, what it was like, how it ended, and its impact on the culture. Understanding Jim Crow introduces readers to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, a collection of more than ten thousand contemptible collectibles that are used to engage visitors in intense and intelligent discussions about race, race relations, and racism. The items are offensive. They were meant to be offensive. The items in the Jim Crow Museum served to dehumanize blacks and legitimized patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Using racist objects as teaching tools seems counterintuitive—and, quite frankly, needlessly risky. Many Americans are already apprehensive discussing race relations, especially in settings where their ideas are challenged. The museum and this book exist to help overcome our collective trepidation and reluctance to talk about race. Fully illustrated, and with context provided by the museum’s founder and director David Pilgrim, Understanding Jim Crow is both a grisly tour through America’s past and an auspicious starting point for racial understanding and healing.

A lively account includes the grand themes and the state's major players in the civil rights movement and tells the story of the struggle for racial equality through the lives and contributions of such notables as Harriett Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, and Frederick Douglass, as well as some of Maryland's important but relatively unknown men and women.

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books 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 helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious 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 and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

With strength and resilience, Africans have persevered through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and were able to rebuild a life after slavery while enduring the inhumane conditions of the civil rights Jim Crow era forced upon them by the African diaspora. The lack of acknowledgement of the generational trauma these events have had on their descendants continues to create further injury. Even today, barriers prevent their healing and transition from survival to a thriving existence. Unspoken Truth is a bold collection of poetry highlighting the generational pain of Africans living in the diaspora. Through her poems, Bowden creates a panoramic view of the terrible conditions they endured for centuries. Deliberately, with dignity, she brings the trauma stories of African Nova Scotians told around kitchen tables for decades to the homes of readers while restoring the balance of humanity and royalty from which the African journey began. Despite all odds, they were able to preserve their lineage and lean on the resilience buried deep in their souls while passing this pride, culture, and strength on to future generations so they may one day fulfill the hopes and the dreams of the former slaves. This collection seeks to spark the necessary conversations the larger society needs to engage in around the perseverance of systemic racism, a society now grappling to make the connections between historical trauma and current-day conditions of inequality. It summons the conscience of every reader to acknowledge the truth and reconcile it with their own dissonance. The poems pay homage to the ancestors, honour the elders, and provide inspiration for the youth so they can heal from this historical inheritance and build upon their own narratives.