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Books by James
Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century
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The
American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's
Notebook
Living for Change: An Autobiography
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Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation's Future
Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party /
Racism and the Class Struggle
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The
Dropout Challenge
By Grace Lee Boggs
When students in Detroit public schools are
counted this September, the total is expected to be 10,000 less
than last fall and 50,000 less than ten years ago.
Each dropout means a loss of nearly $7000 in state funding. This
means worsening financial crisis, more layoffs and school
closings, and more pressure and stress on the remaining
principals, teachers, and students.
Some of these dropouts transfer to charter or suburban schools.
Most end up on the streets, adding to the climate of violence
and insecurity in our neighborhoods and swelling the prison
population.
That's why the dropout issue is a challenge to everyone, whoever
you are and whatever you do.
For a visionary, yet practical response to this challenge, I
recommend the writings of Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Assistant
Professor and Economist in the African American Studies
Department and The Democracy Collective at the University of
Maryland, whose special interest is exploring alternative
democratic strategies for urban development.
I have never met Jessica Nembhard but I keep abreast of her work
because, like Jimmy Boggs, she recognizes that the profound
changes taking place in our economy and the deindustrialization
of cities like Detroit challenge us to make equally profound
changes in how we make our livings and how we educate our
children.
In a recent article, "On the Road to Democratic Economic
Participation: Educating African American Youth in the
Post-Industrial Global Economy," Nembhard explains how the
new information economy requires not only new technical skills
but "people-oriented" skills, like leadership
development, team building and collaboration, problem-solving,
learning by doing – the skills denied to young people in our
factory-model inner city schools.
She also gives examples of programs that both help motivate
youth to be academic achievers and provide real world
experiences where they learn by doing and participate
democratically, developing leadership, advocacy and
entrepreneurial skills.
One example is an evening class in cooperative economics given
by a young people's cooperative at Roosevelt High School in
Gary, Indiana, which became the most popular academic class in
the school.
Another is the Youth Warriors Environmental Justice After School
Program in Baltimore, MD, which focuses African American 13-18
year olds on learning about and becoming active in addressing
local environmental injustices.
Through this program the young people serve
the community and develop leadership skills while also learning
environmental science and communication skills.
The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund
provides opportunities for African American youth to learn about
the theory and practice of cooperatives and business
development.
According to Nembhard, the "pragmatic
decision by many young people not to invest in schooling"
is not irrational. It is because the connection between academic
achievement and economic reward has become so remote and because
we have not yet found ways to pass on to our young people the
African American legacy of cooperative ownership and the black
economic empowerment ideas of leaders like DuBois, Garvey and
Ella Baker.
Young people can be drawn back into school, she believes, by
innovative curricula that are participatory and activist and
involve them early on in economic development. "Even more
important, school settings can be training grounds for
alternative democratic community-based economic development (and
for the skills needed to design, develop and manage such
enterprises). Students can learn entrepreneurial, cooperative
business skills, along with other necessary skills and
attitudes, and at the same time have experience building and
running democratic economic enterprises in their neighborhoods."
[Jessica Nembhard cam be found in] Chapter 10 in the new book on
Black Education: A
Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century,
edited by my friend Joyce King and published by Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2005.
Source:
Michigan
Citizen, August 21-27, 2005 //
Living for Change: An Autobiography
by
Grace Lee Boggs*
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Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer,
and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass
the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor,
Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and
Environmental Justice. Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant
parents in l915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in
l935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in l940.
In the l940s and l950s she worked with West
Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in l953 she came
to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American
labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in
grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40
years until James' death in July l993.
Their
book,
Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century,
was published by Monthly Review Press in l974. |
In l992, with James Boggs and others, she
founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational
youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the
ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000.
Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network, the
Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit, writes for
the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly
commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).
Her
Living for Change: An Autobiography published
by the University of Minnesota Press in March l998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university
classes on social movements and autobiography writing. -- http://www.boggscenter.org/
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Privatizing Education: The Neoliberal Project
Black Education and Afro-Pessimism /
The Collapse of Urban Public
Schooling
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Zippety Doo Dah, Zippety-Ay: How Satisfactch'll Is Education
Today? Toward a New Song of the South
Dr. Joyce E. King on Black Education
and New Paradigms
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Black Student College Graduation Rates
Remain Low, But Modest Progress Begins to Show
Nationwide, the black student
graduation rate remains at a dismally low 42 percent. But the rate
has improved by three percentage points over the past two years.
More encouraging is the fact that over the past seven years the
black student graduation rate has improved at almost all of the
nation's highest-ranked universities.
On page 11 of this issue of
JBHE we report the encouraging news that African-American
enrollments at the vast majority of our nation's highest-ranked
colleges and universities have shown significant improvement over
the past quarter-century.
But a more important
statistical measure of the performance of blacks in higher education
is how many black students throughout the nation are completing
school and earning a college degree. Department of Education data
reveals that, as expected, black students who earn a four-year
college degree have incomes that are substantially higher than
blacks who have only some college experience but have not earned a
degree. Most important, blacks who complete a four-year college
education have a median income that is near parity with similarly
educated whites.
According to the most recent
statistics, the nationwide college graduation rate for black
students stands at an appallingly low rate of 42 percent. This
figure is 20 percentage points below the 62 percent rate for white
students. Here, the only positive news we have to report is that
over the past two years the black student graduation rate has
improved by three percentage points.
Source:
JBHE
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Basil Davidson's "Africa Series"
Different
But Equal /
Mastering A Continent /
Caravans
of Gold /
The King and the City /
The Bible and The Gun
West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A
History to 1850
By
Basil Davidson
African Slave Trade: Precolonial History,
1450-1850
By Basil Davidson
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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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
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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 /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 5 August 2010
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