Freedom's Odyssey: African American History Essays from Phylon - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966855515 ISBN 13: 9780966855517

Publisher: Clark Atlanta Univ Pr

Synopsis

Reprints 29 essays published in Phylon: the Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture from 1940, when W. E. B. Du Bois founded the journal, to 1987. They are arranged in the sections Freedom Denied: Enslaved Africans; Freedom Beckons; Abolition, colonization, and emigration; Freedom's People: African Americans during the postbellum reconstruction era; Freedom Delayed: Separation and Inequality in the Jim Crow era; and Freedom's Champion's: Race Leadership and Organizational Efforts. Each essay is accompanied by an editorial preface, and the volume itself is indexed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

paper 0-9668555-1-5 A valuable, at times brilliant collection of 29 scholarly essays on African-American histrory. Henderson and Sumler-Edmond, both historians at Clark Atlanta University, have compiled essays originally published in Phylon, a journal founded by W.E.B. DuBois. These essays cover a wide range of topics, from slave revolts, to abolitionism, to desegregation and the civil rights movement. What they offer collectively is a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of the African-American experience. Lorenzo Greene, in his vivid essay on slave ship mutinies, exposes the hypocrisy of 18th-century New England slave merchants, devout Puritans who defended their trade as serving to Christianize the African heathens. John L. Rury's essay describes the patronizing attitudes most 19th-century white reformers held toward African-Americans, who were viewed as ``an alien and undesirable social group'' needing the moralizing influence of white elites. Tyrone Tillery examines the famous rift between Frederick Douglass and his abolitionist mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. The split was inevitable, Tillery contends, because Douglass and other African-Americans were excluded from policy-making roles in Garrison's abolitionist organization: the ambitious Douglass wanted his own voice. Billy D. Higgins's essay details how former slaves reacted to the betrayals of Reconstruction, when ``Southern whites stifled the aspirations of blacks for political and social equality'' by enacting Jim Crow laws. Essays on desegregation of the military, baseball, and public education show the ceaseless struggles African-Americans faced against creative, seemingly endless white opposition. The final essay, James A. Colaiaco's analysis of Martin Luther King's tactic of nonviolence, is simply stunning in its insight and clarity. King's ``nonviolent method was most successful,'' Colaiaco points out,''when it provoked violence from the defenders of the racist order.'' Thus, at the heart of King's nonviolence was the paradoxical expectation of violence, a latent racist violence that King wanted to expose to the world. An often provocative and undeniably welcome addition to African- American studies. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The inaugural title from Clark Atlanta University Press offers scholarly essays on topics in African-American history that were originally published in Phylon: A Review of Race and Culture, founded in 1940 by W.E.B. Dubois. Organized chronologically and thematically, the selections focus on resistance to slavery, economic and political advancement after the Civil War, migration, the establishment of black townships in the West, the black press, racial integration of the military and major league baseball, and "origins of Diaspora consciousness" among African-Americans. At their best, the essays complement each other in fascinating ways. In "Abolition and Colonization," Bruce Rosen contrasts Southern slave-owners' support for the American Colonization Society (which espoused the removal of free blacks from the U.S., but did not seek to dismantle slavery) with the "intense opposition" of free blacks to its aims. Meanwhile, in "The Negro Emigration Movement," Howard Bell points up the contemporaneous efforts of blacks to establish a political entity with a black majority outside of the U.S. Although the editors say the text is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses, most essays employ an academic vocabulary that is likely to challenge general readers. Since four of the 29 essays were written before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which radically altered many historians' view of the role of African-Americans in the U.S., and only nine were written during the 1980s (and none since), overall the collection feels dated. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clark Atlanta Univ Pr
• ISBN 10: 0966855515
• ISBN 13: 9780966855517
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 511
• Editor: Henderson Alexa Benson, Sumler-Edmond Janice