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Books by
Ronald Walters
Black Presidential Politics in America
(1989) /
Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora
(1993) /
African American Leadership (1999)
Bibliography of African American
Leadership: An Annotated Guide (2000) /
White Nationalism Black Interests
(2003)
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Books by Amiri
Baraka
Tales of the Out &
the Gone
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The Essence of Reparations /
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
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Blues People
Autobiography
of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka /
Selected Poetry of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
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Black Music
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A Conference Call
Black Studies Forty Years Later,
1969-2009
100 Day Assessment of the Barack Obama
Presidency
From an African American Perspective
Friday, May 1, through Sunday May 3, 2009 at Temple
University, Philadelphia, PA.
Sponsored by
Center for African American Research and Public
Policy at Temple University and
The Philadelphia
Community Institute of Africana Studies
Black Studies as a
discipline was institutionalized in 1969. The first
department was established at San Francisco State
College. Since then, over 200 Black Studies departments
have been established at colleges and universities
across the United States with several offering doctoral
degrees in African American Studies or Africana Studies.
As an academic discipline, Black Studies was originally
designed to describe and explain the conditions and
problems faced by African American communities and to
identify and assess alternative solutions to improve
their life situations.
Over the years,
Black Studies departments have struggled to remain true
to the original mission. Faced with changing
circumstances, Black Studies departments have attempted
to interrogate these changes and their implications for
the struggle for racial justice in the United States and
throughout the world. Continuing this tradition, the
Center for African American Research and Public Policy
at Temple University and the Philadelphia Community
Institute of Africana Studies propose to examine three
historically significant developments: (1) the election
of President Barack Obama, (2) the financial crisis of
American capitalism and (3) the current state of Black
Studies. Each is sure to have dramatic and long term
consequences in the struggle for human rights, racial
justice and equality in the United States.
The Call
As the Obama
presidency begins, the crisis of financial monopoly
capitalism threatens to devolve into a world-wide
depression, a depression that would have dire
consequences for African American and other oppressed
communities around the world. Precisely how the Obama
administration plans to address the problem remains
unclear. It is widely agreed, however that the problem
is urgent and that what happens during the early months
of the Obama administration will have an undeniable
impact on the course of the 21st century. Thus the
first one hundred days of the Obama administration are
critical. The world needs a clear theoretically driven
understanding of the financial crisis and a commensurate
understanding of the initiatives proposed and undertaken
by the Obama administration. We invited scholars and
activists to come and participate in the analysis of
these critical problems that face the African American
community at this juncture in American history with the
goal of devising recommended solutions on Friday, May 1,
through Sunday May 3, 2009 at Temple University,
Philadelphia, PA.
Plan of Solutions
Today, as social
activist and change agents for our respected Village
here in America, it is our duty and responsibility to
collect and synthesize the perceptions, concerns, and
desires of rank-and-file African Americans and give
voice to those who have been traditionally and
systematically excluded from full and effective
participation in the American politico-economic system.
We propose to do this and we propose to go further. We
will not only give voice to those not traditionally
heard, we will also identify and evaluate proposed
solutions and develop strategies for their
implementation. From an African American perspective, we
propose to examine the first one hundred days of the
Obama administration with a view to determining:
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1. What it is and
what it is not?
2. What specific
initiatives have been offered to address
what particular problems?
3. To what extent
is resource allocation commensurate with
both the problem and proposed solution?
4. What are the
potential impacts of proposed solutions on
the long term growth and development of
African American communities and
individuals?
5. What are some
alternative solutions being discussed in
African American communities?
6. What can we do
as African Americans to maximize community
interests in this unfolding process?
7. What is the
role and function of Black Studies in the
global 21st century? |
This call grows out
of our understanding of the world as a global system, a
system in which the pursuit of distinct community
interests is bound by global realities. Thus our theme,
“Think globally, act locally. We envision developing a
portfolio of alternative solutions that will be
incorporated into the national discussion and public
policy debate. We also expect that our proposed
solutions will become agenda items for independent
African American socio-economic and political groups.
Contacts
Please fax a one
page abstracts to Dr. Muhammad Ahmad at 215-204-5953. If
you have any questions or need any further information,
please contact
Dr.
Muhammad Ahmad at 215-204-1995
or
mstanfrd@temple.edu, Amiri Baraka at
973-242-1346, Mack Jones at 404-699-0631,
Ron
Walters at 301-421-5919,
Dr. Nathaniel Norment, Jr.
at 215-204-5073 or
norme01@temple.edu, LaFrance Howard at 215-204-3159.
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Dr.
Muhammad Ahmad was national field
chairman of the Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM) during the mid-60s and
founder of the African People's Party in the
1970s. He has worked closely with Malcolm X,
Jesse Gray, Amiri Baraka, Stokely
Carmichael, James and Grace Lee Boggs, James
Forman, Robert and Mabel Williams, Queen
Mother Audley Moore and others, in founding
and carrying out various Black liberation
projects and organizations. Who better,
then, to pen a major assessment of some of
the most important Black radical
organizations of the 60s? Here is a study of
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP),
the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW),
that only he could have done. "Drawing upon
his extensive network of personal and
political contacts and his unique
understanding of the connections between
persons, organizations, and events (too
often viewed in isolation), Ahmad has made a
significant contribution toward deepening
our understanding of a period whose
complexities might otherwise be lost to
future generations." [from the Introduction
by
John Bracey] |
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On
Cecil Brown's
Dude,
Where's My Black Studies Department -- Thus Africans and Caribbean
Negroes were in many cases less radical, even though much of the
African American radical tradition comes from immigrants, such
as Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Toure, Malcolm X and
Farrakhan. As Amina Baraka informed me, "We're all West
Indians."
And this is true because kidnapped Africans were
brought to the Caribbean for "the breaking in," then
transferred to North America and elsewhere.
And we must ask ourselves would we rather have a radical
immigrant African in black studies or a reactionary Negro only
because he is a Negro.
Marvin X, Africa or
America: The Emphasis in Black Studies Programs |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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update 23 February 2012
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