Just A Little Country Boy

Just A Little Country Boy is a story of the trials in the life of a young black boy born during the late Depression years in Arkansas. In 1940, when segregation was at its worst in the South, his father moved the family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in search of a better life. An industrial revolution was taking place throughout the North at the time, offering better employment opportunities for the black man. Therefore the Black Migration began with black families leaving the servile attitudes of the South with the dreams of a better life. LeRoy Allen was blessed with good, hard-working parents who taught him to take pride in himself, to work hard, use good manners, and to respect all people. As a teenager, he took an interest in, and competed in almost all sports, but his big interest was boxing. He became Wisconsins State Golden Gloves champion for 3 different years. Later, he spent a few years as a professional boxer, meeting and sparring with many well-known boxers of that era. As a young adult, he became more aware of the prejudices and inequities surrounding the black man. Most of his adult years were spent moving from job to job, trying to improve his circumstances, while searching for decent employment to support his growing family. After experiencing nearly 50 different jobs, he succeeded in being hired into a position for which he was trained and well qualified. He was well into middle age before the job market began to hire women or blacks into responsible positions. Mr. Allen records many of the changes in the attitudes towards blacks in Milwaukee, and across the nation, as they occured during the last half of the 20th century. It is a story of faith, determination, and fortitude and a real insight into our nations awakening to the talents of our black citizens and our growing respect for their contributions to our society.

Country Boy is a fiction novel which takes place in the Carolinas. It takes you away from the streetlights of the inner cities to the backwoods, dirt roads, and trailer parks, where poverty is often overlooked. It's the Real Dirty South. This thugged-out love story was based in the small city of Rockingham, North Carolina in a small community called Piney Grove, home of the Real Murderous Clique, The P.G. Crew. The Crew is made up of a group of young boys who grew up together in Piney Grove and created this group of backwoods, jaw-breaking, pistol-toting, country gangstersQ, AKA "Big Country" is the head of The Crew with Omar, Fat Dave, Poo, Glenn AKA "June", Tim, Big Kev, and Corey making up the body. . Eventually, they went from hanging in the neighborhood to the hustle game. Q is that nigga. Loved by few, hated by many, but damned sho' respected by all. Ballers envied him, women wanted him. After building his empire to a status most hustlers only dreamed of, Q suffers through tragedies that come with this lifestyle. . With the support of his only true love Van and the respect of all the O.G.s in the Carolinas, nobody's safe from his wrath.But as the city boys always say, "Everybody can't make it to the top without deadly consequences."

This autobiography of the first Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University offers an unconventional account of farm life in New York and the Middle West during the nineteenth century, and of the difficulties attendant upon building up a vital and progressive agricultural college. Born in Seneca County, New York, in 1833, Isaac Phillips Roberts emigrated west--first to Indiana, where he worked as a carpenter until he was able to buy a farm, and taught school during the winters; then, in 1862, to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in a pioneer wagon with his wife, Margaret, and daughter. In 1869, he became the Superindent of the Farm and Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Iowa Agricultural College at Ames, where he soon became Professor of Agriculture. In 1873, he returned to New York to take a similar position at Cornell University; shortly thereafer, he was made Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Director of the Experiment Station. During his thirty years of service in Ithaca, he wrote voluminously on agricultural subjects, and after his retirement, penned Autobiography of a Farm Boy, initially published in 1916, reissued by Cornell University Press in 1946, and now made available in paperback. He died in Palo Alto, California, in 1928.

In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form -- the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism -- even hedonism -- and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.