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Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
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From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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Our Women Keep our
Skies From Falling
Six Essays
in Support of The
Struggle To Smash Sexism/Develop Women
Preface
It Ain't Easy
By Kalamu ya Salaam
Writing these essays has been an intensely
educational and qualitatively critical experience in my life
effort to contribute to the ongoing defense and development of
African-americans.
"Women's Rights Are Human Rights"
was first presented at an international Human Rights conference
that was held during November 1978 at Xavier University in New
Orleans; later, it was published in BLACK SCHOLAR
(Vol.10, Nos. 6,7).
"Revolutionary
Struggle/Revolutionary Love" was written as a contribution
to the 1979 THE BLACK SCHOLAR (Vol. 10, Nos. 8,9) forum,
"The Black Sexism Debate," which was generated around
responses to an earlier article written by Robert Staples.
"Debunking Myths" was written in my
preparation as a panelist at AHIDIANA's 2nd Annual Black Woman's
Conference 1979. "RAPE: A Radical Analysis From An
African-American Perspective" was written in 1978,
extensively discussed within our organization, AHIDIANA, and
revised in 1979 and 1980. A shorter version of the rape essay
appeared in the "Meaningful Relationships" issue of BLACK
BOOKS BULLETIN (Vol.6, No.4).
"The Struggle To Smash Sexism Is A
Struggle To Develop Women" was presented in outline form at
AHIDIANA's 2nd Annual Black Woman's Conference 1979. "On
Getting Together" was written in preparation for my
participation in AHIDIANA's 3rd Annual Black Woman's Conference
1980. "And Raise Beauty To Another Level Of Sweetness"
is a poem written as part of a promotional effort for the
May/June Woman's issue of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine
(Vol.10, No.5).
Writing these pieces has required an
all-around reassessment of social relationships. In fact, my
study of the so-called "woman's question" has helped
broaden my understanding of how necessarily deep a revolutionary
transformation must go into our "personal" lives. This
is particularly true for those cadre who strive to be
responsible and leading elements of our people's struggle for
peace and power.
What has been most difficult - and
concurrently most rewarding, most valuable - is getting outside
the strait-jacket of my individual self, i.e. my own
experiential limitations, and being able to study and begin to
understand the experiences and viewpoints of people different
from myself. While this process has been facilitated by
traveling to different Third World countries, study and struggle
around sexism in combination with attempts to practice what is
preached has made the biggest difference in opening my eyes to
the reality of others.
The socialization of this society, and
likewise of most societies in the modern world, intentionally
blinds us, not only to the situation of other peoples, but
indeed, such crippling socialization also blinds us to the
reality of different forms of oppression, exploitation and their
effects on us in America.
For many of us, the only vision we have been
taught and believe, concerning the possibilities of human
existence, is: "niggers," "white folks," and
"foreigners." That's a very narrow, destructive and
self-limiting conception of human potential and actuality—but
it has been this vision of life choices which has (misguided us
down the river of underdevelopment. Unknowingly, we have labored
mightily at the oars pushing the boat of ignorance further into
the social jungles of prejudice, self-alienation and cynicism
about human nature and the human condition. In some cases, our
twisted perceptions and lifestyles have led us unconsciously,
although still backwardly, to become either "oreos"
or, worse yet, "brown eyed, red necks."
Far too many of us have not yet realized how
socially damaging the Euro-american indoctrination has been. And
now, just as we are struggling through the anti-social aspects
of having been victimized by racism, just as we are moving to a
higher awareness and advance front of class struggle, our whole
world is again overturned in the militant and fiercely
interpersonal struggle around sexism.
In the cases of race and class struggle, the
human agents of enemy philosophies and actions were, for the
most part, external to African-american women and men. However,
struggle around sexism is a different matter. Macho-isms are
mouthed by and manifested in the beliefs and behavior of
African-american, as well as Euro-american, men. Now the rain
falls on our heads.
Many of us do not like this and even go so
far as to absurdly suggest that because we are Black we can walk
between the raindrops and somehow, incredibly, not get wet. But
this is no quickly passing, brief spring shower. What we are
facing is a full strength st6~m whose flood water will wash away
all of the sexually exploitive, macho-designed social structures
which crowd the landscape of our living in this country. Whether
we like it or not, we African-americans must swim or sink, must
either construct sexually non-exploitive relationships or else
socially drown as our various unions crumble and fall apart.
Only after a long period of individual and
collective study and struggle have I been able to move toward
actualizing, in my own personal life, thorough going
anti-sexist/pro-feminist principles and practice. Like many men
before me, and, I'm sure, like other men who will come after me,
dealing with the truism that "the personal is
political," in the context of struggling around sexism, has
called for a qualitative transformation of my own social life, a
transformation whose magnitude and importance I had not
anticipated.
What I now realize is that the three main
"personal" social relationships of American society -
woman/man relationships, home life, and childcare/child rearing
- are all designed to support male lifestyle choices. As men, we
could actively participate in past struggles against racism and
economic exploitation without confronting the wrongness of our
interpersonal relationships.
Furthermore, these relationships
invariably were male-dominant and female exploitive, thusly
providing African-american men a sphere of social control which compensated for our exclusion from
broader avenues of power within the American political and
economic system. So comes this question of sexism and everything
is upset. There is no rest, no pleasure. "Our women,"
literally and figuratively, no longer "belong to us. We men
were extremely comfortable with the way our relationships were
in the past. Today, there is an element of brooding anger at
"them" those "women libbers" who have messed
up our "good/Black thing" by injecting ideas which
originated from "bored bourgeoisie white housewives."
This anger and blindness, this refusal to deal with the reality
of our woman/man relationships, this reactionary stubbornness is
but the emotional skin which covers an adherence to a sexist
system of social relationships which affords men both social and
material privileges, as well as, automatic authority over the
lives of women.
This is the skin and the sexist social system
I'm happily shedding. I understand that for women and men in
America, the restructuring of our personal lives is a major and
difficult revolutionary step. And though it ain't easy, we are
steady stepping on, steady struggling toward a qualitatively
better social system within which women and men have political
and economic equality. Cover Drawing by Douglass Redd copyright July 1980 By Kalamu ya
Salaam
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Ella
Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
A Radical
Democratic Vision
By Barbara Ransby
One of
the most important African American leaders
of the twentieth century and perhaps the
most influential woman in the civil rights
movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an
activist whose remarkable career spanned
fifty years and touched thousands of lives.
A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned
the spotlight in favor of vital
behind-the-scenes work that helped power the
black freedom struggle. She was a national
officer and key figure in the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, one of the founders of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime
mover in the creation of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. |
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Baker made a place for herself in
predominantly male political circles that included W. E.
B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King
Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a
vibrant group of women, students, and activists both
black and white.
In this deeply researched
biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker's
long and rich political career as an
organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher,
from her early experiences in depression-era
Harlem to the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s. Ransby shows Baker to be a
complex figure whose radical, democratic
worldview, commitment to empowering the
black poor, and emphasis on group-centered,
grassroots leadership set her apart from
most of her political contemporaries. Beyond
documenting an extraordinary life, the book
paints a vivid picture of the African
American fight for justice and its
intersections with other progressive
struggles worldwide across the twentieth
century.
UNC Press
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Who Was Ella
Baker—Ella Baker began her involvement with the
NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and
then served as director of branches from 1943 until
1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker co-founded the
organization In Friendship to raise money to fight
against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South. In 1957,
Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin
Luther King's new organization, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran
a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for
Citizenship.
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On
February 1, 1960, a group of black
college students from North Carolina A&T
University refused to leave a
Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro,
North Carolina where they had been
denied service. Baker left the SCLC
after the Greensboro sit-ins. She wanted
to assist the new student activists
because she viewed
young, emerging activists as a resource
and an asset to the movement. Miss
Baker organized a meeting at Shaw
University for the student leaders of
the sit-ins in April 1960. From that
meeting, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born.
Adopting the Gandhian theory of
nonviolent direct action, SNCC members
joined with activists from the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize in
the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1964 SNCC
helped create Freedom Summer, an effort
to focus national attention on
Mississippi's racism and to register
black voters. . . . |
With Ella
Baker's guidance and encouragement, SNCC became one
of the foremost advocates for human rights in the
country. Ella Baker once said, "This may only be a
dream of mine, but I think it can be made real." Her
audacity to
dream big is a cornerstone of our philosophy.
Her influence was reflected in the nickname she
acquired: "Fundi," a Swahili word meaning a person
who teaches a craft to the
next generation. Baker continued to be a
respected and influential leader in the fight for
human and civil rights until her death on December
13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.—EllaBakerCenter
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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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 Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
By Annette
Gordon-Reed
This is a scholar's
book: serious, thick, complex. It's also fascinating, wise
and of the utmost importance. Gordon-Reed, a professor of
both history and law who in her previous book helped solve
some of the mysteries of the intimate relationship between
Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, now brings to
life the entire Hemings family and its tangled blood links
with slave-holding Virginia whites over an entire century.
Gordon-Reed never slips into cynicism about the author of
the Declaration of Independence. Instead, she shows how his
life was deeply affected by his slave kinspeople: his lover
(who was the half-sister of his deceased wife) and their
children. Everyone comes vividly to life, as do the places,
like Paris and Philadelphia, in which Jefferson, his
daughters and some of his black family lived. So, too, do
the complexities and varieties of slaves' lives and the
nature of the choices they had to make—when they had the
luxury of making a choice. Gordon-Reed's genius for reading
nearly silent records makes this an extraordinary work.—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
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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
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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