San Antonio College Library

Recounts Miller's coming-of-age in Depression-era Orangeburg, South Carolina. Reconstructs the sights, sounds, and social complexities of the pre-civil rights South and his youth as a closet rebel who successfully evaded the worst strictures of a racially segregated small town. By the time he is forced into exile, we realize that this fate was inevitable for a young man too intelligent and aware of the limitations of his society to remain there without...

Spanning the sweep of southern women's history from colonial times to the late 20th century, this collection represents the best scholarship on the lives and experiences of black and white southern women. It explores how southern women constantly moved beyond the traditional confines of race, class, and gender to resist the restrictions of a patriarchal society and assert themselves through organizations and institutions in their communities and personal...

"Freedom Is Not Enough : The Opening of the American Workplace" by Nancy MacLean --- "In the 1950s, the exclusion of women and of black and Latino men from higher-paying jobs was so universal as to seem normal to most Americans. Today, diversity in the workforce is a point of pride. How did such a transformation come about? In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists...

A powerful, uncompromising portrait of the inner city, "Streetwise" asks us to consider the dilemma of both blacks and whites caught up in the new struggle not only for common ground -- prime real estate -- but for shared moral community. Elijah Anderson begins by looking at the brief encounters and daily exchanges -- among friends, neighbors, and strangers -- that take place in the parks and at the bus stop, on the streets and in other public spaces....

In Maintaining Segregation, LeeAnn G. Reynolds explores how black and white children in the early twentieth-century South learned about segregation in their homes, schools, and churches. As public lynchings and other displays of racial violence declined in the 1920s, a culture of silence developed around segregation, serving to forestall, absorb, and deflect individual challenges to the racial hierarchy. The cumulative effect of the racial instruction...

"In post-World War II America, when professional football owners scheduled exhibition games in the South and later placed franchises, they simply overlooked Jim Crow conditions endured by African American players. To Live and Play in Dixie is an oral history from the players themselves on how they battled discrimination while playing and living in the still-segregated South"--

Leon F. Litwack constructs an account of life in the Jim Crow South. Drawing on an array of contemporary documents and first-person narratives from both blacks and whites, he examines how black men and women learned to live with the severe restrictions imposed on their lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Litwack relates how black schools and colleges struggled to fulfill the expectations placed on them in a climate that...

"This book uses theoretical applications and social narratives to push back against ideals associated with the black monolith by examining the many ways in which black Americans struggle to cope with educational, cultural, and socio-economical expectations"--

"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as 'human computers' used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...

"This one-volume reference work examines a broad range of topics related to the establishment, maintenance, and eventual dismantling of the discriminatory system known as Jim Crow. Many Americans imagine that African Americans' struggle to achieve equal rights has advanced in a linear fashion from the end of slavery until the present. In reality, for more than six decades, African Americans had their civil rights and basic human rights systematically...