Check It Out! -- Black History Month February 2011

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: the Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Bartoletti examines how the Ku Klux Klan formed and grew after the Civil War. She deftly places the unsettling events into cultural and political context without oversimplifying. Numerous first-person quotes give the book its pulse, and expertly selected stories of people on all sides of the violent conflicts give readers a larger understanding of the conditions that incubated the Klan’s terrorism; how profoundly those involved suffered; and how that legacy of fear, racism, and brutality runs through our own time. Archival images on every page will leave an indelible impression on readers. (from Booklist)

Available for checkout at the IHCC Library.

Check It Out! -- Black History Month February 2011

Howard Bryant's The Last Hero is the saga of the beguiling Henry Aaron and his journey. In this beautifully written and culturally important biography, Howard Bryant tells the Aaron story with gusto and a ferocious sweep. There is plenty of baseball, but just as important the book includes front-office politics and the struggles of those who, like Aaron, came up right behind Jackie Robinson. It is also a deft examination of how white writers and black writers wrote about Aaron.

(From the Washington Post 5/23/10)

Available for checkout at the IHCC Library!!

Check It Out! -- Black History Month February 2011

In the Warmth of Other Suns; The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, author Isabel Wilkerson follows the journey of three Southern blacks, each representing a different decade of the Great Migration as well as a different destination... a shrewd storytelling device, as it allows her to highlight two issues often overlooked: first, that the exodus was a continuous phenomenon spanning the years 1915 - 1970; second, that it consisted of three geographical streams, the patterns determined by the train routes available to those bold enough to leave. (From NYT, Sept. 2, 2010)

One of the New York Times's best books of 2010 -- now available for checkout in the IHCC Library!

Check It Out! -- Black History Month February 2011

Gordon Parks--photographer for Life magazine, writer, composer, artist, and filmmaker--was only 16 in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to "prove my worth."
Working as a janitor, railroad porter, musician, or basketball player in such places as St. Paul, Chicago, and New York, Parks struggled against poverty and racism. He taught himself photography with a secondhand camera, worked for black newspapers, and began to document the poverty among African Americans on Chicago's South Side.
Then his photographic work brought him to Washington, D.C., as first a photographer with the federal Farm Security Administration and later a war correspondent during World War II.
This compelling autobiography, first published in 1966, tells how Parks managed to escape the poverty and bigotry around him, and launch his distinguished career, by choosing the weapons given him by "a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred."

(from MN Historical Society)

Available for checkout in the library!