Critical Race Theory- An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017, ISBN 9781479802760).

 

 

Purchased from Amazon on 20210714 for $17.99
 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952, Y3814 Signet)

I think a lot of people read this book when they were in school, but I was never assigned to read it. I bought a copy years ago, but just got around to reading it. I used to think that this was non-fiction for some reason, but of course it is a novel.

The story is about the experience of a black man growing up in the south and then moving to NYC.

Probably purchased at Powell's Books, date unknown, price $2. This book was a discard from a school library.

Blues People by LeRoi Jones. 1963, ISBN 0-688-18474-X.
Subtitle: The Negro experience in White America and the music that developed from it.
This book is about African-American music. How it got started with the slaves from Africa and their work songs, to Gospel, to Blues, to Ragtime, to early Jazz and to the various forms of Jazz that developed up until about 1960. (At least the edition I read stops at about 1960.) Doesn't discuss Rock or any more recent musical forms. Very interesting, written at a College level.
Purchased at Cameron's 1996 for $2.50.

Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. 1968. This book is a collection of essays and letters written over a period of several years. At the time it was highly provocative. The first two sections were interesting, the final section seemed to me to be a bit silly.

Black Cargoes, History of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Daniel P. Mannix in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley. ISBN 0 1400 4253 9. Covers the four hundred year history of Europeans purchasing people in Africa and transporting them to North and South America. Well written and refers in many places to historical documents. Has several pages of drawings depicting conditions on the ships, etc. The sad thing is that in many places in the world slavery is still allowed, e.g., in Haiti (a former French colony that was freed by slave revolt) people still sell their children into slavery. (See Restavec.)

Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1964

By Lerone Bennett, Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Published by Penguin Books, 1966

ISBN 0140208569, 9780140208566

435 pages

This book was written as a series of magazine (Ebony) articles in the early 1960s when the word Negro was still accepted. Now, of course, one would say African-American. Very well written, it describes this history of Africans in the Americas, mostly in the USA.