Manchild in the Promised Land

Manchild in the Promised Land PDF Author: Claude Brown
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451626673
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Manchild in the Promised Landis indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem - the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humour. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring. Here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and became a man.

Manchild in the Promised Land

Manchild in the Promised Land PDF Author: Claude Brown
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451626673
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
Manchild in the Promised Landis indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s. When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem - the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humour. The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because the book is affirmative and inspiring. Here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and became a man.

The Children of Ham

The Children of Ham PDF Author: Claude Brown
Publisher: Scarborough House
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Book Description
The children of Ham are a group of young people ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two, who live in a condemned tenement in upper Harlem, a shell of a building owned by New York City. The children look out for themselves; they are a self-constituted family. They give to each other what they cannot get anywhere else: friendship and a sense of belonging. As you eavesdrop on their conversations, you learn about the families who abandoned -- or who abandoned them. Home for the children of Ham is this wreck of a house, the Harlem castle where they protect and sustain each other on hope as tenuous as life. It is their life that brims over in this book by Claude Brown. -- From publisher's description.

Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

Things That Make White People Uncomfortable PDF Author: Michael Bennett
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642590800
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He's also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable. Bennett adds his unmistakable voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field.Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things that Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for our turbulent times, a memoir, and a manifesto as hilarious and engaging as it is illuminating.

Makes Me Wanna Holler

Makes Me Wanna Holler PDF Author: Nathan McCall
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787680
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • One of our most visceral and important memoirs on race in America, this is the story of Nathan McCall, who began life as a smart kid in a close, protective family in a black working-class neighborhood. Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery. In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard—and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles—and the great hopes—of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

Don't Shoot

Don't Shoot PDF Author: David M. Kennedy
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408828898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The remarkable story of David Kennedy's crusade to combat America's plague of gang- and drug-related violence - with methods that have been astonishingly effective across the country. 'If you want to read a book on urban gangs and find out why they exist and why they kill each other, read this ... this is a sociology book, but it's like immersing yourself in The Wire ... When Kennedy says something, you believe him' Scotsman Gang- and drug-related inner-city violence, with its attendant epidemic of incarceration, is the defining crime problem in our country. In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every two hundred young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution. Don't Shoot tells the story of Kennedy's long journey. Riding with beat cops, hanging with gang members, and stoop-sitting with grandmothers, Kennedy found that all parties misunderstood each other, caught in a spiral of racialized anger and distrust. He envisioned an approach in which everyone-gang members, cops, and community members-comes together in what is essentially a huge intervention. Offenders are told that the violence must stop, that even the cops want them to stay alive and out of prison, and that even their families support swift law enforcement if the violence continues. In city after city, the same miracle has followed: violence plummets, drug markets dry up, and the relationship between the police and the community is reset. This is a landmark book, chronicling a paradigm shift in how we address one of America's most shameful social problems. A riveting, page-turning read, it combines the street vérité of The Wire, the social science of Gang Leader for a Day, and the moral urgency and personal journey of Fist Stick Knife Gun. But unlike anybody else, Kennedy shows that there could be an end in sight.

Spoken Soul

Spoken Soul PDF Author: John Russell Rickford
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 0470247843
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
In Praise of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English "Spoken Soul brilliantly fills a huge gap. . . . a delightfully readable introduction to the elegant interweave between the language and its culture." –Ralph W. Fasold, Georgetown university "A lively, well-documented history of Black English . . . that will enlighten and inform not only educators, for whom it should be required reading, but all who value and question language." –Kirkus Reviews "Spoken Soul is a must read for anyone who is interested in the connection between language and identity." –Chicago Defender Claude Brown called Black English "Spoken Soul." Toni Morrison said, "It's a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher’s: to make you stand out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language." Now renowned linguist John R. Rickford and journalist Russell J. Rickford provide the definitive guide to African American vernacular English–from its origins and features to its powerful fascination for society at large.

Fin & Lady

Fin & Lady PDF Author: Cathleen Schine
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374154902
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In the Greenwich Village of 1964, eleven-year-old Fin moves in with his glamorous, careless older sister, and it's hard to tell who's raising whom.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace PDF Author: Jeff Hobbs
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147673190X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A biography of a young African-American man who escaped the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets when he returned home.

Down These Mean Streets

Down These Mean Streets PDF Author: Piri Thomas
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780679732389
Category : Harlem (New York, N.Y.)
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
"A linguistic event. Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics . . . mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound." --The New York Times Book Review Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.

A Place to Go, A Place to Grow

A Place to Go, A Place to Grow PDF Author: Lou Dantzler
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In the wake of the Watts riots in the 1960s, Dantzler founded the Challengers Boys and Girls Club. What started out as a circle of 12 boys meeting under a maple tree has grown into a $6 million facility that has served 32,000 boys and girls. In this volume, he shares his philosophy of caring and the secrets of his success working with at-risk kids.