The first biography of Emmett J. Scott, chief of staff, adviser, and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington, and power player behind the Tuskegee Institute.
On April 7, 1984, T. J. Patterson became the first African American elected to the Lubbock City Council, winning handily over his four opponents. It was a position he would go on to hold for more than twenty years, and his natural leadership would lead him to state and national recognition. Patterson grew up during a time of American social unrest, protest, and upheaval, and he recounts memorable instances of segregation and integration in West Texas. As a two-year-old, he survived polio when African Americans were excluded from "whites only" hospitals. When he attempted to enroll at Texas Tech after graduating from all-black Bishop College, he was not allowed even to enter the administration building--the president would speak with him only outside, and then only to say Patterson could not be enrolled. Two years later, his aunt would become the first African American to attend Texas Tech. Patterson spent his...
Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race
by Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson
Foreword by Quintard Taylor
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9780896729834
Pub Date: January 2016
As Senator Ernest Chambers returns to the public forum with a 2012 bid for reelection to the Nebraska office he held for thirty-eight years, Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson presents the first public biography of this influential leader. Documenting Chambers’s experience, influences, and struggles, Johnson traces the growth of the Black Power Movement in Nebraska, within the context of similar developments throughout the United States.
While baseball may have long been considered an all-American sport in which a melting pot could celebrate ethnic heroes like Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg, Connie Mack, and Stan Musial, racial segregation excluded blacks from an otherwise democratic picture. Such was certainly the case in Texas, where, in the state’s first professional matchup soon after the Civil War, the R. E. Lees faced the Stonewalls—and African Americans, not surprisingly, played no part. Drawing upon oral histories and mining such rare sources as rosters and box scores from black newspapers, Rob Fink situates Texas’s African American teams and players against the rise and decline of professional Negro Leagues. From the 1880s Galveston Flyaways through Dallas shortstop Ernie Banks’s signing with the Chicago Cubs in 1953, Playing in Shadows brings to light an important but little-studied inning in American sport.
An intimate portrait of the multiethnic family and challenging circumstances in which Charles Gordone, first African American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was raised in Elkhart, Indiana. * * * * * * * * What happens when even the family color compass compounds the burdens of childhood? Before playwright Charles Gordone became a Texan, he became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama, for No Place to Be Somebody. Now, in her family memoir, Gordone’s younger sister Shirley covers the years prior to his geographical and psychological journey west, an Indiana childhood that deeply informed his pilgrimage. “Here is the drama that permeates not just the lives of blacks who grow up among whites but of countless blacks who find themselves living and working between worlds. Fanon refers to this as ‘certain uncertainty,’ Du Bois calls it ‘double consciousness,’ Bernard Bell refers to...
The African American Experience in Texas collects for the first time the finest historical research and writing on African Americans in Texas. Covering the time period between 1820 and the late 1970s,...
