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There is an ongoing debate as to whether African American Studies is a discipline, or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary field. Some scholars assert that African American Studies use a well-defined common approach in examining history, politics, and the family in the same way as scholars in the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. Other scholars consider African American Studies multidisciplinary, a field somewhat comparable to the field of education in which scholars employ a variety of disciplinary lenses-be they anthropological, psychological, historical, etc., --to study the African world experience. In this model the boundaries between traditional disciplines are accepted, and researches in African American Studies simply conduct discipline based an analysis of particular topics. Finally, another group of scholars insists that African American Studies is interdisciplinary, an enterprise that generates distinctive analyses by combining perspectives from different traditional disciplines and synthesizing them into a unique framework of analysis. ... Read more

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introduction to african american studies
this book was extremely informative and i have a better understanding of the issues involved.the author really explained the subject of the african american experience with intelligence and sophistication.i would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the african american culture! ... Read more

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This book is the most comprehensive anthology in the field. The discipline continues to evolve as to the intellectual, political, and social aspects of African American Studies, and how the discipline will advance knowledge about African Americans for the future. This edition contains new authors, updated introductions to each section and the bibliography, expansion of the glossary of biographies, and review questions and critical analyses for each section. Topics include: The Discipline; African American Women's Studies; Historical Perspectives; Philosophical Perspectives; Theoretical Foundations; Political Perspectives; Critical Issues and Perspectives; and Curriculum Development and Program Models. ... Read more

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Informative.
I've only read the section on womens studies vs black studies and black womens studies. However, it keeps me wondering more. It allows me to come up with my own opinion, not making me choose sides. ... Read more

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Against a backdrop of multiculturalism and Afrocentricity in the intellectual traditions of African-American Studies, this book sets new standards and directions for the future. It is the first book to systematically address the many themes that have changed the political and social landscape for African Americans. Among these changes are new transnational processes of globalization, the devastating impact of neoliberal public policies upon urban minority communities, increasing imprisonment and attendant loss of voting rights especially among black males, the surging of Hispanic population, and widening class differences as deindustrialization, crack cocaine, and gentrification entered urban communities. Marable and a cast of influential contributors suggest that a new beginning is needed for African American scholarship. They explain why Black Studies needs to break its conceptual and thematic limitations, exploring "blackness" in new ways and in different geographic sites. They outline the major intersectionalities that should shape a new Black Studies - the complex relationships between race, gender, sexuality, class and youth. They argue that African-American Studies scholarship must help shape and redirect public policies that affect black communities, working with government, foundations and other private institutions on such issues as housing, health care, and criminal justice. ... Read more

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This anthology is designed to introduce the reader to the contours and content of African American Studies. The text and readings included here not only impart information, but seek, as their foremost goal, to precipitate in the reader an awareness of the complex and changing character of the African American experience--its origins, developments, and future challenges. The book aims to engage readers in the critical analysis of a broad spectrum of subjects, themes, and issues--ancient and medieval Africa, Western European domination and African enslavement, resistance to oppression, African American expressive culture, family and educational policies, economic and political matters, and the importance of ideas. The materials included in this anthology comprise a discussion of some of the fundamental problems and prospects related to the African American experience that deserve attention in a course in African American Studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

In good/usable condition
The item was a little better than I thought it would be. It is used, and does show signs of wear, but is totally usable. ... Read more

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For introductory and upper division courses in African American Literature, African American Politics, African American History, or Black Studies.This comprehensive anthology of primary texts surveys the experience of Africans in America from the eighteenth century to the present. Texts from a variety of disciplines encompass history, literature, and politics, and accurately represent the expression of African America. The book also highlights the usually neglected tradition of radicalism in African American Studies. ... Read more

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During most of the twentieth century, Archibald J. Carey, Sr. (1868-1931) and Archibald J. Carey, Jr. (1908-1981), father and son, exemplified a blend of ministry and politics that many African American religious leaders pursued. Their sacred and secular concerns merged in efforts to improve the spiritual and material well-being of their congregations. But as political alliances became necessary, both wrestled with moral consequences and varied outcomes. Both were ministers to Chicago's largest African Methodist Episcopal Church congregations- the senior Carey as a bishop, and the junior Carey as a pastor and an attorney.

Bishop Carey associated himself mainly with Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, a Republican, whom he presented to black voters as an ally. When the mayor appointed Carey to the city's civil service commission, Carey helped in the hiring and promotion of local blacks. But alleged impropriety for selling jobs marred the bishop's tenure. The junior Carey, also a Republican and an alderman, became head of the panel on anti-discrimination in employment for the Eisenhower administration. He aided innumerable black federal employees. Although an influential benefactor of CORE and SCLC, Carey associated with notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and compromised support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Both Careys believed politics offered clergy the best opportunities to empower the black population. Their imperfect alliances and mixed results, however, proved the complexity of combining the realms of spirituality and politics.

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The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately five million people helped improve the financial prospects of black Americans, who, in the next generation, moved increasingly into the middle class.

Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event. She also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in thoughtful scholarly analysis of the voices, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history.

These rich oral histories reveal much that is surprising. Although the Jim Crow South presented persistent dangers, the women retained warm memories of southern childhoods. Notwithstanding the burgeoning war industry, most women found themselves left out of industrial work. The North offered its own institutionalized racism; the region was not the promised land. Additionally, these African American women juggled work and family long before such battles became a staple of mainstream discussion. In the face of challenges, the women who share their tales here crafted lives of great meaning from the limited options available, making a way out of no way. ... Read more

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During and after the Harlem Renaissance, two intellectual forces --nationalism and Marxism--clashed and changed the future of African American writing. Current literary thinking says that writers with nationalist leanings wrote the most relevant fiction, poetry, and prose of the day.

Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box challenges that notion. It boldly proposes that such writers as A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, who often saw the world in terms of class struggle, did more to advance the anti-racist politics of African American letters than writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey, who remained enmeshed in nationalist and racialist discourse.

Evaluating the great impact of Marxism and nationalism on black authors from the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression era, Anthony Dawahare argues that the spread of nationalist ideologies and movements between the world wars did guide legitimate political desires of black writers for a world without racism. But the nationalist channels of political and cultural resistance did not address the capitalist foundation of modern racial discrimination.

During the period known as the "Red Decade" (1929-1941), black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of the capitalist world and thus anticipated contemporary scholarship on the intellectual and political hazards of nationalism for the working class.

As it examines the progression of the Great Depression, the book focuses on the shift of black writers to the Communist Left, including analyses of the Communists' position on the "Negro Question," the radical poetry of Langston Hughes, and the writings of Richard Wright.

Anthony Dawahare is an associate professor of English at California State University, Northridge. He has been published in African American Review, MELUS, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature, and the Arts. ... Read more

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In January of 1861, on the eve of both the Civil War and the rebirth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder, John Mifflin Brown wrote to the paper praising its editor Elisha Weaver: "It takes our Western boys to lead off."

Weaver's story, though, like many of the contributions of early black literature outside of the urban Northeast, has almost vanished. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature recovers the work of early African American authors and editors such as Weaver who have been left off maps drawn by historians and literary critics. Individual chapters restore to consideration black literary locations in antebellum St. Louis, antebellum Indiana, Reconstruction-era San Francisco, and several sites tied to the Philadelphia-based Recorder during and after the Civil War.

In conversation with both archival sources and contemporary scholarship, Unexpected Places calls for a large-scale rethinking of the nineteenth-century African American literary landscape. In addition to revisiting such better-known writers as William Wells Brown, Maria Stewart, and Hannah Crafts, Unexpected Places offers the first critical considerations of important figures including William Jay Greenly, Jennie Carter, Polly Wash, and Lizzie Hart. The book's discussion of physical locations leads naturally to careful study of how region is tied to genre, authorship, publication circumstances, the black press, domestic and nascent black nationalist ideologies, and black mobility in the nineteenth century. ... Read more

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Raymond Pace Alexander (1897-1974) was a prominent black attorney in Philadelphia and a distinguished member of the National Bar Association, the oldest and largest association of African American lawyers and judges. A contemporary of such nationally known black attorneys as Charles Hamilton Houston, William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall, Alexander litigated civil rights cases and became well known in Philadelphia. Yet his legacy to the civil rights struggle has received little national recognition.

As a New Negro lawyer during the 1930s, Alexander worked with left-wing organizations to desegregate an all-white elementary school in Berwin, Pennsylvania. After World War II, he became an anti-communist liberal and formed coalitions with like-minded whites. In the sixties, Alexander criticized Black Power rhetoric, but shared some philosophies with Black Power such as black political empowerment and studying black history. By the late sixties, he focused on economic justice by advocating a Marshall Plan for poor Americans and supporting affirmative action.

Alexander was a major contributor to the northern civil rights struggle and was committed to improving the status of black lawyers. He was representative of a generation who created opportunities for African Americans but was later often ignored or castigated by younger leaders who did not support the tactics of the old guard's pioneers.

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Organized by major themes such as creation stories, and resistance to oppression this collection gather works of imagination, politics and history, religion, and culture from many societies and across recorded time. Asante and Abarry marshal together ancient, anonymous writers whose texts were originally written on stone and papyri and the well-known public figures of more recent times whose spoken and written words have shaped the intellectual history of the diaspora. Within this remarkably wide-ranging volume are such sources as prayers and praise songs from ancient Kemet and Ethiopia along with African American spirituals; political commentary from C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Joseph Nyerere; stirring calls for social justice from David Walker, Abdias Nacimento, Franzo Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring newly translated texts and documents published for the first time, the volume also includes an African chronology, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. With this landmark book, Asante and Abarry offer a major contribution to the ongoing debates on defining the African canon.Author note: Molefi Kete Asante is Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Temple University and author of several books, including "The Afrocentric Idea" (Temple) and "The Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans". Abu S. Abarry is Assistant Chair of African American Studies at Temple University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A spectacular resource!
This hefty volume doesn't waste any pages!From ancient Egyptian poetry & history to the modern origins of Kwanzaa, this one has it all.A tremendous resource for students or teachers of history, literature, culture, or religion.My only complaint is the omission of the prolific St. Augustine, but his work is widely available elsewhere.

Excellent Anthology of African and Diasporian Thought
The book is an excellent source of African and Diasporian thought, scholarship, and epistemology. The authors do and excellent job juxtaposing the various creation stories using content analysis to show the parallellsbetween the various creation stories. In addition, the authors do anexcellent job of highlighting the various talented African scholars acrossthe globe. The book is appropriately named and the content in the bookdefinately lends itself to erudition. ... Read more

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This book, the first to focus on the integration of the Gulf Coast, is Dr. Gilbert R. Mason's eyewitness account of harrowing episodes that occurred there during the civil rights movement. Newly opened by court order, documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission's secret files enhance this riveting memoir written by a major civil rights figure in Mississippi. He joined his friends and allies Aaron Henry and the martyred Medgar Evers to combat injustices in one of the nation's most notorious bastions of segregation.

In Mississippi, the civil rights struggle began in May 1959 with "wade-ins." In open and conscious defiance of segregation laws, Mason led nine black Biloxians onto a restricted spot along the twenty-six-mile beach. A year later more wade-ins on beaches reserved for whites set off the bloodiest race riot in the state's history and led the U.S. Justice Department to initiate the first-ever federal court challenge of Mississippi's segregationist laws and practices. Simultaneously, Mason and local activists began their work on the state's first school desegregation suit. As the coordinator of the strategy, he faced threats to his life.

Mason's memoir gives readers a documented journey through the daily humiliations that segregation and racism imposed upon the black populace -- upon fathers, mothers, children, laborers, and professionals. Born in 1928 in the slums of Jackson, Mason acknowledges the impact of his strong extended family and of the supportive system of institutions in the black neighborhood. They nurtured him to manhood and helped fulfill his dream of becoming a physician.

His story recalls the great migration of blacks to the North, of family members who remained in Mississippi, of family ties in Chicago and other northern cities. Following graduation from Tennessee State and Howard University Medical College, he set up his practice in the black section of Biloxi in 1955 and experienced the restrictions that even a black physician suffered in the segregated South. Four years later, he began his battle to dismantle the Jim Crow system. This is the story of his struggle and hard-won victory.

Gilbert R. Mason, M.D., continues as a practicing physician in Biloxi. Although a life-long Democrat, he served as a school-desegregation adviser to the Republican administration of President Nixon, as well as a friend, adviser, and appointee of several Mississippi governors.

James Patterson Smith is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published in numerous periodicals, including the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Mississippi History. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

MS Gulf Coast Primer
If you live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and are interested in the Civil Rights movement, this is a must read.

Must read Civil Rights history
This was an excellent read for an in-depth look into the civil rights struggle in the south. From a black doctor's perspective, the book gives the reader a different look at many events in Mississipi that led to integration and equality, and what was sacrificed to attain what we have today.
The book also gives the reader an intimate look into Dr. Mason's life from childhood to the civil rights era, but not beyond. This book would have been better if more information on Dr. Mason had been included. Hopefully, James Patterson Smith will update the forward now that Dr. Mason has passed, and tell us more about what this book is missing, and perhaps add a brief history of his life after the 60's and 70's. (much has been left out.) I would like to have seen Dr. Mason expand upon his own secondary theme of maintaining morals and ethics to reveal a true struggle between his personal life, his political life, and the lives impacted by his choices, good and bad; the legacy Dr. Mason left to ALL of his children was only hinted at in the secondary theme,(much as this sentence does).
Though little long-winded in parts, this is an excellent study of Black history in the south.

A physician of all seasons
Dr. Gilbert Mason has written a book which not only stands as an important literary stone in the foundation of the civil rights movement, but also as a window into the humanity and "higher calling" of being a physician.As a white physician in Mississipppi, I was riveted when I read this book.The hardship which was endured by African Americans during this era is unimaginable, and it was only a generation ago.With eloquence and thouroughness Dr. Mason leads us through the origins of the civil rights movement specifically as it occurred in Biloxi MS. The racial hatred and violence which opposed his nonviolent protests and the fledgling Biloxi chapter of the NAACP is laid out for the reader with very good clarity.When I read this book, the secondary theme also jumped out at me, which was his constant pusuit of being a physician , specifically maintaing high degree of ethics, morality, and care for all patients black are white during this period of tribulation.I highly recommend this book to all. ... Read more

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"Marcia Riggs's work fills a critical gap in the work and vision of the black church in the United States..." Emilie M. Townes, Union Seminary, New York Riggs draws on the black women's club movement in the nineteenth century to provide a means for developing intragroup responsibility that can overcome the discouraging effects of racism, sexism, and classism. ... Read more

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The Companion to African-American Studies is a groundbreaking re-appraisal of the history and future of African American studies. Each original essay by an expert scholar in the field covers its topic with authority and clarity. This book is a definitive intervention at a critical time in the history of race relations and in the academic field of race and ethnic studies. Bringing together a dazzling array of established and emergent voices, the Companion opens with a series of reflections from those who waged pitched battles to establish African American Studies as a bona fide academic discipline.Students and scholars of the field will find this to be an exciting and comprehensive overview, and an ideal resource for study and further research. ... Read more

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From the earliest years of sound film in America, Hollywood studios and independent producers of "race films" for black audiences created stories featuring African American religious practices. In the first book to examine how the movies constructed images of African American religion, Judith Weisenfeld explores these cinematic representations and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity.
Drawing on such textual sources as studio production files, censorship records, and discussions and debates about religion and film in the black press, as well as providing close readings of films, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched book brings religious studies and film history together in innovative ways. ... Read more

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Religions in the US
This is a one-of-a-kind book, placed between U.S. Religious history, African-American traditions, and film history. No other study has articulated what Weisenfeld achieves here. It is a grounded work in articulating African American religious history through a history of film production. This includes both its heyday (a ala Oscar Micheaux and others) and its eventual demise at the hands of the big Hollywood studios. Should be included for all general "Religion in America" courses, as well as "Religion and Film" courses. ... Read more

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The African-American Studies Core List is an annotated checklist of scholarly books providing a "snapshot" of the resources used in the instruction of the "black experience in the Americas" during a given academic year. The Core List is for use by academic department administrators, researchers, publishers of Africana materials as well as librarians selecting materials for instruction and research in the field of African-American studies.

The Core List contains 304 key titles in 50 subject areas. Titles appearing on five or more faculty lists are described along with complete bibliographic data, Library of Congress subject headings, call numbers, and abstracts. ... Read more

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Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their adherence to the religion suggest unsuspected subtleties and complexities in the relation of women, especially black women, to Islam? Carolyn Rouse sought answers to these questions among the women of Sunni Muslim mosques in Los Angeles. Her richly textured study provides rare insight into the meaning of Islam for African American women; in particular, Rouse shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligations.
In Engaged Surrender, Islam becomes a unique prism for clarifying the role of faith in contemporary black women's experience. Through these women's stories, Rouse reveals how commitment to Islam refracts complex processes--urbanization, political and social radicalization, and deindustrialization--that shape black lives generally, and black women's lives in particular. Rather than focusing on traditional (and deeply male) ideas of autonomy and supremacy, the book--and the community of women it depicts--emphasizes more holistic notions of collective obligation, personal humility, and commitment to overarching codes of conduct and belief. A much-needed corrective to media portraits of Islam and the misconceptions they engender, this engaged and engaging work offers an intimate, in-depth look into the vexed and interlocking issues of Islam, gender, and race. ... Read more

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Excellent scholarly work!
In this ethnographic study of African American women converts to the mainstream Sunni Islam in two communities in Los Angeles, California, Carolyn Moxley Rouse tries to understand what inspired these converts to make the switch and under what circumstances, as well as how they accept, interpret, and live Islamic teachings that are generally viewed as oppressive to women particularly when viewed from the Western feminist lens. Carolyn Moxley Rouse, currently an assistant professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, conducted this study as her Ph.D. thesis over the span of 10 years. The question she attempted to answer was: are those African American women reproducing their oppression? Her answer to this question is: "African American women who convert have `surrendered' to Islam-but `surrendered' in a way that engages their political consciousness and produces not only a spiritual but a social epiphany" (20). In Gender Negotiations chapter she gives evidence to how conversion to Islam has been an asset to some "to undo self-hatred" prevalent in African American communities.

The thesis of the book is: "The Muslima (Muslim sisters) accept the religiously prescribed gender roles and codes of conduct, believing that liberation emerges out of these disciplinary practices. Ultimately, the social history of black women in the United States contributes substantially to the reason why Muslima view Islam as a faith with the potential to liberate women from racism, sexism, and classism.... This book explores the lives of several women who through overt displays of their faith use their bodies as sites of resistance. These sisters challenge hegemonic discourse about race, gender, community, and faith at the level of the everyday." One of her main conclusions is that African American women's conversion to Sunni Islam cannot be described as simply "false consciousness" or full "liberation."

Rouse argues that her informants find their empowerment through the religious exegesis and authorizing discourse of Islam. Those who wear the hijab, in Rouse's study, are not only fulfilling a religious duty, but are also making statements of disagreement with the American mainstream culture, resisting Western middle-class hegemonic expectations of how a liberated American woman should look like and what she should wear. "For African Americans to socially acknowledge their Islamic faith through certain types of dress is like carrying a United States exit visa; it is a sign marking the closure of access to certain social and material rewards....[It] could be considered a form of social suicide" (8-9). This is true for everyone who publicly displays their religious, particularly Islamic, identity in the US, not just for African Americans. This is also true, and even to a greater extent, in other parts of the world where, for example, girls are expelled from public schools in France for choosing to wear the hijab.

In Chapter One, Rouse argues that African American Muslims in the communities she studied believe that "performing an Islamic identity in the United States, so to speak, may in the long run change social relations" where they can have "a more just community and society, [and] more successful interpersonal relationships" (9). I feel Rouse did not go through with this argument and did not give strong evidence to strengthen it. In fact, it seems to me that the personal lives of some of the women she interviewed are far away from having "successful interpersonal relationships" and it looks like the second generation of those converts is being co-opted/reclaimed by the American mainstream secular culture and driven back into poverty, illiteracy, and drugs.

Perhaps the strongest argument of this book is that some or most of Rouse's interviewees consider the Qur'an a feminist text and use religious exegesis (religious interpretation) to define their roles and empower themselves at a personal level, family level, and within the community. Male-centered readings of the Qur'an and Hadith, and not Islam itself, are the barriers to liberation (173). Rouse determines ambivalence, "which women attempt to reconcile through a holistic sense-making that combines exegesis, common sense, and pragmatism" as a path to empowerment. "[T]here is a layered process of identity reformulation that involves dimensions of both ambivalence and empowerment."

I believe Rouse has done Muslim women justice by letting the Muslim women themselves be heard instead of being represented by feminists, scholars, or extremists. Among the strong views that those Muslim women voiced was their belief that within the domestic sphere, gender roles are separate/different but equal and that wife's obedience to husband is conditional on husband's fulfillment of his financial responsibility. African American women converts believe that Western feminism led by white middle-class women has failed to liberate all women because social problems such as teenage pregnancies and decay of family structure have only increased. Additionally, Muslim feminists challenge Western feminist ideology of work as an empowerment for women. "[I]t is impossible to try to derive an objective universal truth about the ways in which people can or must be empowered."

Rouse's account of the four professional women who choose to perform faith, marriage, and career at the same time (in Chapter Seven) is an excellent, enlightening one that serves to balance some of the negativity surrounding women's status in Islam in the US. For example, in Zipporah's case, she is an example of an assertive Muslim woman who "believes the men are simply not ready for what she sees as Islam's radical empowerment of women" (168). In the case of Maimouna who owns a very successful law firm and who uses Islamic history to refer to "the four perfect women in Islam," Rouse says: "Far from the ideal of a wife secluded at home, Islam reaffirms for Maimouna that being a mother, wife, and professional are indeed compatible" (170).

This book displays the intersections of race, class, and gender in forming women's identities and characterizing their agency. Here, added to this mix of multiple subjectivities is the element of religion, where Islam makes those African American Muslim women a minority within a minority with a minority. Rouse says: "These women are resisting the deep structure, the internalized racism, sexism, and classism, a process I believe that is fundamental for lasting sociopolitical change" (218). In conclusion, African American Muslim women converts' surrender to Allah is accompanied by "engagement with the sources of faith, the texts, and the community."
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Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives.

Establishing their courtships, often across plantations, the enslaved men and women of antebellum North Carolina worked within and around the slave system in order to create and maintain meaningful personal relationships that were both of and apart from the world of the plantation. They claimed the right to participate in the social events of courtship and, in the process, challenged and disrupted the southern social order in discreet and covert acts of defiance.

Informed by feminist conceptions of gender, sexuality, power, and resistance, the study argues that the courting relationship afforded the enslaved a significant social space through which they could cultivate alternative identities to those which were imposed upon them in the context of their daily working lives. ... Read more

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Although Aaron Henry (1922-1997) was one of the nation's major grassroots fighters in the freedom movement on local, state, and national levels, his name has not yet been accorded its full recognition. This book reveals why Aaron Henry should be acknowledged, in the ranks of Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers, as a truly influential crusader.

Long before many of his contemporaries, he was a civil rights activist, but he preferred to stay out of the limelight. A certified pharmacist and owner of Fourth Street Drug Store in Clarksdale, he considered himself a down-home businessman who must not leave Mississippi. Although he was a key figure in bringing Head Start, housing, employment, and health service to his state, his tact and his quiet diplomacy garnered him less attention than more radical protesters received.

Born in the age of segregation in the Mississippi Delta, the son of a sharecropper, he became state president of the NAACP in 1959. He was able, more than any previous leader, to unite Mississippi blacks, despite diversities of age, ideology, and class, in confronting white supremacy. He spearheaded the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Some activists criticized him for urging protesters to take the middle ground between the NAACP's conservative position and SNCC's militant activism. Facing recurring death threats, thirty-three jailings, and Klan bombings of his home and drugstore, Henry remained stalwart and courageous. John Dittmer describes him as a "conservative militant," willing not only to risk his life but also to compromise on issues of strategy even when doing so led to alienation from outspoken activists.

Constance Curry has shaped this personal narrative of a brave and underacknowledged man who helped to change his state forever. To his candid story, transcribed from interviews he gave two young historians in 1965, Curry adds new material from her own interviews with his family, friends, and political associates. Henry's prophetic voice documents a momentous period in African American history that extends from the Great Depression through the civil rights movement in the pivotal 1960s.

Constance Curry is the author of Silver Rights, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1996. She lives in Atlanta. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Unsung Civil Rights leader
The Fire Ever Burning is definitely a book anyone interested in the Civil Rights movement should read. Henry helped secure the headstart program for Mississippi and risked his life so that all Mississippians could enjoy the rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. Although his name is not as recognizable as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and other civil rights icons, his role in the movement was just as important. If you are a student of the Civil Rights movement or just interested in the movement itself, add this book to your reading list.

Another Beautiful Book
"The Fire Ever Burning" by Aaron Henry and Constance Curry is an important contribution about the Civil Rights Movement. Henry was loved by his friends and was considered to be astute, brave and caring. As was often typical of the times, he was accused of some rotten stuff. How else do you stop people from obtaining their rights? Constance Curry, who wrote this book from Henry's papers, lived the Civil Rights Movement and was actively involved in the Mississippi Delta where Henry lived. She is a careful researcher and writes from the heart. Like "Silver Rights" by Curry, about school integration in the Delta, this book is another good read and I highly recommend it.

Aaron Henry--a morally bankrupt man
I came to know Aaron Henry when he was elected to serve in the Mississippi House in 1980. Initially I thought he was a doddering relic, yet pleasant enough, who tended to pontificate. He was in over his head and didn't really seem to have much interest in the legislative process and, as a result, was not highly regarded by his peers. He had a long history of arrests in city parks in the middle of the night, if you catch my drift. He made advances toward me and several other individuals--it was pathetic. Aaron Henry is indicative of the rotten core of the civil rights movement and liberal politicians in general--you don't have to look far for this. He ranks up there with Al Lowenstein and Bill Clinton. I believe this book is self serving and out of synch with reality. ... Read more