San Antonio College Library

For a brief period after the Civil War, the first and in many ways the last years of Emancipation, there was a great upsurge of optimism and achievement among Negro Americans, Black politicians, lawyers, businessmen and farmers showed that neither servitude nor skin color was relevant to the incidence of ability, intelligence, creativity, and dignity.

"Charcoal and Cinnamon explores the continuing redefinition of women of African descent in the Caribbean, focusing on the manner in which literature has influenced their treatment and contributed to the formation of their shifting identities." "While various studies have explored this subject, much of the existing research harbors a blindness to the literature of the non-English-speaking territories. Claudette Williams bases her analyses on poetry...

The Accommodation recounts a series of organized dynamite bombings of black-owned homes in the 1950s. It explores a more recent history of land expropriation, by which the black middleclass in Dallas was stripped of the fruits of its labor. The question is whether these evils have been properly settled by history. Or have they merely been buried beneath layers of repression and censorship? The author doesn't draw peremptory conclusions but rather...

Hen we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow - two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide. Starting with segregation's ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity's...

Martin Luther King's 1965 address from Montgomery, Alabama, the center of much racial conflict at the time and the location of the well-publicized bus boycott a decade earlier, is often considered by historians to be the culmination of the civil rights era in American history. In his momentous speech, King declared that segregation was "on its deathbed" and that the movement had already achieved significant milestones. Although the civil rights movement...

Traces the rise of the American Republican Party to its current, almost unassailable position in presidential elections. The authors argue that the main voting issues in the USA since the mid-1960s have been underpinned by racial anxiety and resentment of welfare liberalities.

Many have questioned FDR's record on race, suggesting that he had the opportunity but not the will to advance the civil rights of African Americans. Kevin J. McMahon challenges this view, arguing instead that Roosevelt's administration played a crucial role in the Supreme Court's increasing commitment to racial equality -- which culminated in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. McMahon shows how FDR's attempt to strengthen the presidency...