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Books by Eugene Redmond
Sides of the River (1969)
/
Sentry of the
Four Golden Pillars (1970) /
River of Bones and Flesh and Blood
(1971) /
Songs
from an Afro/Phone (1972)
In
a Time of Rain & Desire (1973) /
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003) /
Drumvoices
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Books by Henry
Dumas
Ark of Bones
(1970) /
Poetry for
My People (1971) /
Play Ebony
Play Ivory (1974)
/
Jonah and the Green Stone
(1976)
Rope of Wind and Other Stories
(1979) /
Goodbye,
Sweetwater (1988) /
Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected
Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)
Echo
Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
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* *
Play Ebony Play Ivory
By Henry
Dumas
Edited by
Eugene B. Redmond
134 pp.
New York / Random
House. / Cloth $5.95 Paper $2.95
Henry Dumas was born on
July 29, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas, and had completed a Ulyssean
journey by the time he was shot to death by a policeman in a New York
subway on May 23, 1968. That journey included migration at the age of
ten to Harlem, to the north where he attended New York public schools
He join the U.S. Air Force in 1953 and was stationed at Lackland Air
Force Base in San Antonio, Texas; he also spent a year stationed on the
Arabian Peninsula. While in the Air Force, Dumas won creative-writing
awards for his contributions to Air Force periodicals.
In 1955, he married
Loretta Ponton. The couple had two children, David and Michael.
After returning from his tour with the Air Force in 1957, Dumas
attended City College and Rutgers University. Known
for his work as a publicist and teacher, Dumas helped to develop
the "little magazine" circuit. In
the early 1960s, Dumas transported food and clothing to protesters
in Tennessee and Mississippi. Dumas remained active in the civil
rights and Black Power movements for the remainder of his life.
In 1967, he taught at Hiram
College in Ohio in the Upward Bound Program (where
he served on the staff of the Hiram Poetry Review).
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Later that year (1967)
Dumas became the director of language workshops at Southern Illinois
University's Experiment in Higher Education Program (at
the time of his death, was teacher-counselor and director of language
workshops).
In April of 1968, at the
age of thirty-three, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit
Authority Policeman at 125th Street Station in a case of "mistaken
identity." At the time of his death, he had already finished
several manuscripts of poetry and short stories.
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In 1970 SIU press
published limited editions of Dumas' posthumously collected poetry and
prose. And since the time of his death, his writings have appeared in
numerous anthologies, some of which are Black Out Loud, Open
Poetry, The Poetry of Black America, Understanding the New
Black Poetry, Words Among America and Brothers and
Sisters.
The
vulnerability of black children amid the Southern white lynch-mob
mentality, a young sharecropper encountering a civil-rights worker, and
whites experiencing the mystical force of black music are among the
subjects Dumas examined in his short stories, many of which were
collected in Ark of Bones (1970) and
Rope of Wind (1979).
Nature, revolutionary politics, and music are especially frequent
subjects of his poetry, which is noted for its faithfulness to the
language and cadence of African-American speech.
Authors including James Baldwin, Gwendolyn
Brooks, and Maya Angelou
have celebrated his writing for its mixture of natural and supernatural
phenomena, music, beauty, and revolutionary politics.
Dumas' poetry, short
fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due
to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe.
Play Ebony
Play Ivory
first appeared in 1970 and was later published as Play
Ebony, Play Ivory. When Play Ebony, Play Ivory appeared in
1974, Julius Lester in the New York Times Book Review called Dumas
"the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties."
Dumas' first collection
of short fiction,
Ark of Bones and Other Stories,
was first published in 1974. Redmond has also helped to bring out an
unfinished novel,
Jonah and the Green Stone (1976), as well as
the collections
Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979),
Goodbye,
Sweetwater (1988), and
Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected
Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989).
The Henry Dumas Memorial Library has been established
at SIU's experimental college. And the Hiram Poetry Review sponsors an
annual poetry contest in Dumas' name. he is survived by his wife,
Loretta Dumas, and two sons, David and Michael. * * *
* * About the Editor (in 1975)
Eugene B. Redmond, poet, essayist and playwright, is professor of
English and Poet-in-Residence at California State University,
Sacramento. He has taught at several United States colleges and
universities, including Southern Illinois University, where he was a
colleague of Henry Dumas. Redmond's books of poetry are
Sides of the River (1969,)
Sentry of the
Four Golden Pillars (1970),
River of Bones and Flesh and Blood
(1971),
Songs
from an Afro/Phone (1972), Consider Loneliness As These Things, and
In
a Time of Rain & Desire 1973); his LP recording of poetry, Bloodlinks
and Sacred Places, was released by Black River Writers in 1973. He
edited
Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A
Critical History (1976) and
Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003)
During the sixties, Redmond edited Midwestern community newspapers
and served for two years as senior consultant to Katherine Dunham at the
Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis. His writings have
appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Black
World, Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, Open
Poetry, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Black Orpheus, American
Dialog, Discourses on Poetry and The New Black Poetry.
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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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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
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
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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