Negritude

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934 - Teresa Leininger-Miller Rutgers University Press, March 2001.
This major study focuses on the work and careers of African American artists in Paris during the period between the world wars. It makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of black art and artists in the twentieth century. Richly researched, New Negro Artists in Paris peers deeply into the lives and work of six artists: Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Palmer Hay&n, Hale Woodruff, Archibald J. Motley Jr., Augusta Savage and Albert Alexander Smith, all of whom spent time in Paris during the 1920s and early 1930s. It is a microscopic view of the world illuminated by Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). While that book covered the lives of black Americans in Paris over eight decades, Leininger-Miller's book has a sharper focus; it gives us a closer look. Aided by a marvellous selection of black-and-white and color illustrations, the book portrays lives that are exhilarating while sometimes heartbreaking.

PIONEERS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC. Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment 1772-1815. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and William L. Andrews. Large paperback. Brand new. 439pp. A fine copy. The African-American literary tradition begins with the writings of African slaves in the New World. While slave narratives are often excerpted and anthologized, they are rarely collected in their entirety. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic includes the complete texts of the most important and absorbing slave narratives from the eighteenth century: -- A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince. First published in 1772, Gronniosaw's narrative is among the first to portray slavery from the perspective of a native born African. -- Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black. Marrant's story deals with his capture by Cherokee Indians in the South Carolina back country. -- Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, by Ottobah Cugoano, captured at the age of thirteen from his home in what is now Ghana, sold into slavery, and taken to Grenada. -- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, the first slave narrative to become an international bestseller. -- The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher. Jea is perhaps the only black writer to publish both an autobiography and a work of imaginative literature prior to the twentieth century, yet his works were lost for decades and only rediscovered in 1983. Rich in description, adventure, and spirituality, these narratives resonate with the ideal of human equality before God and the triumph of faith over suffering. The complete texts of autobiographies by which members of the groups known at the time as the Black Atlantic Writers staked a claim in the Enlightenment, which until then had been constructed as European terrain that blacks were unfit for.

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Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers Double-Dutched Readings. Valerie Lee. Routledge, 1997. Paperback. New. 224pp. This volume examines the lives of real granny midwives and other healers, oral narratives, ethnographic research and documentation, and considers them in tandem with their fictional counterparts in the work of Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and others. Pilate, the famous literary midwife in Toni Morrison s Song of Solomon, functions as conjure woman, healer, mother, sister, necessary pariah, and caretaker of the community. She resurrects - or re-births - forgotten cultural lore when she sings "O Sugarman done fly"at the same time as a Black male jumps off of a building to his death. For Pilate, the suicide jump becomes synonymous with the folklore of captured Africans flying home after glimpsing the horrors of enslavement in the New World. Just as Pilate's singing "contextualizes his flight within a tradition," Valerie Lee's Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings provides an historical context for the Black midwifery tradition of the South and its representation in contemporary Black women's fiction. Lee examines Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day to discover the ways in which these writers theorize the "politics of identity, race, and class" through midwife characters such as Pilate and Naylor's Miranda. By using the real-life stories of Black, Southern midwives (called granny midwives) to situate and complicate their literary representation, Lee performs what she terms a "double-dutch reading": an athletically and rhythmically challenging way to jump rope that involves two ropes turning in opposite directions from each other, yet remaining in sync. The jumper must listen to the rhythm of the ropes hitting the ground (and, perhaps more importantly, hear the silence of the ropes in the air - the space in between the beats) to know when to jump into the mix, and then remain jumping within the ropes for as long as possible. Citing historical and statistical documents, and African American community lore, Lee challenges critics of African American literature to negotiate movements between fictional narratives as representation of culture and historical narratives as records of culture in order to better envision them both as cultural performances. (Kimberly Blockett University of Wisconsin-Madison). Brand new copy.

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Possessing the Secret of Joy. Alice Walker. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. First edition. Hardcover. 8vo. Original cloth gilt with fine in fine dustwrapper.
"Black people are natural, they possess the secret of joy," proclaims the epigraph to Alice Walker's new novel. These are the words of Mirella Ricciardi, identified by Ms. Walker as a "white colonialist author" whose book, "African Saga," was published in 1982, and they are used here with bitter irony. "With the added experience of my safaris behind me," Ms. Ricciardi writes, apparently without any postcolonial self-consciousness, "I had begun to understand the code of 'birth, copulation and death' by which [ the Africans ] lived" and why they could "survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them." "But what is it? This secret of joy of which she writes," demands Tashi, Ms. Walker's protagonist, when, toward the end of the novel, she herself reads Ms. Ricciardi's book. And what, the novel asks, is the secret of Tashi's pain? Tashi, a black African woman who has spent most of her adult life in the United States, has made peripheral appearances in Ms. Walker's previous books "The Color Purple" and "The Temple of My Familiar," but she occupies center stage in this one. She has indeed survived "suffering and humiliation," though only narrowly, and she cannot speak of them. "They've made the telling of the suffering itself taboo," says her husband, Adam, a black American. "Possessing the Secret of Joy" is about the "telling" of suffering and the breaking of taboos. And when taboos are broken, new forms and modes of discourse must evolve to contain that which has previously been unspeakable. Along the way, Ms. Walker probes the various arguments in an extremely complex debate. She airs such unresolved moral problems as the idealization and deification of liberation leaders, the easy acceptance of corruption in a "good" political cause and the collusion that exists between oppressor and oppressed -- a collusion on which the oppressor's tyranny relies. The people in Ms. Walker's book are archetypes rather than characters as we have come to expect them in the 20th-century novel, and this is by defiant intention. One character, a white man, speaks of "an ancient self that thirsts for knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. . . . A self that is horrified at what was done to [ Tashi ] , but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A truly universal self." When the novel is operating genuinely on this archetypal level, it has a mythic strength. Its many voices are not rendered as stream-of-consciousness monologues, nor are they made to belong to distinct individuals. Instead, they are highly stylized, operatic, prophetic -- and powerfully poetic. The characters speak as Jason and Medea speak in Greek drama, as Greed and Sloth and Grief speak in the medieval plays. (by JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL)

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By The Light Of My Father's Smile. Alice Walker. The Women's Press Ltd. UK 1998. 1st Uk edition.NEW HARDBACK. 234 X 153mm. 224 pgs.
To the afterlife created in Alice Walker's latest novel, say amen and believe. This place is a spiritual "last stop for 200 miles" before the Highway to Heaven, complete with redemption's tools: clear hindsight, unadulterated instinct, forgiveness, and the chance to make amends for eternal peace. And it is from this afterlife that much of By the Light of My Father's Smile is narrated, with the living and the dead haunting each other in vignettes of lust, transcendent love, self-determination, pain, and elemental human nature. Susannah and June are the daughters of African-American anthropologists who want to observe the secluded and nearly extinct Mundo Indian tribe of Mexico. An agnostic, their father agrees to be a minister and convert the unbelievers in exchange for church funding, moving his family to the tribe's remote community in the Sierra Madres. By day he preaches Christian stories that he doubts in order to get closer to tribal secrets, while at night he defrocks and indulges his voracious libido with his haughty wife.

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Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin : With a New Afterword. James Campbell. University of California Press, 2001. Brand new book. James Baldwin was one of America's finest and most influential writers. By the time he died in 1987, his books, such as The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Giovanni's Room, had become modern classics. James Campbell knew Baldwin for ten years before Baldwin's death. For this book, he interviewed many of Baldwin's friends and examined several hundred pages of correspondence. He quotes from the vast and disturbing file that the FBI compiled on Baldwin and he discusses Baldwin's sometimes turbulent relationships with Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Marlon Brando, as well as his friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. Elegantly written, candid, and original, Talking at the Gates is a comprehensive account of the life and work of a writer who believed that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

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The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners. Debra J. Dickerson. Pantheon Books, New York, 2004. Hardcover. Good in Very Good jacket. EXCELLENT book. “This book will prove and promote the idea that the concept of ‘blackness,’ as it has come to be understood, is rapidly losing its ability to describe, let alone predict or manipulate, the political and social behavior of African Americans.” Such is the explosive enterprise of what is sure to be one of the most controversial books of recent times. How has the notion of “blackness” bamboozled African Americans into an unhealthy obsession with white America? What are the deleterious consequences of this? How has “blackness” diminished the sovereignty of African Americans as rational and moral beings? How has white America exploited the concept to sublimate its rage toward and contempt for black America? Is American racism an intractable malaise, and who gets to decide when the past is over? In this unstinting, keen, and brutally funny manifesto, Debra Dickerson critiques “race” as a bankrupt scientific and social construct, exposing the insidious, manipulative racial myths and prejudices still held by American blacks and whites. She examines much statistical rubbish that passes for sociological fact, the purposeful corruption of American history, and the resulting social ills and pathologies bedeviling both the black and white communities. She bravely argues that, whether or not African Americans still have a moral claim against this country, they must now be fiercely self-reliant, ignoring the hackneyed presuppositions and expectations of whites and other blacks still stuck in tired and fruitless ways of thinking.

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Unsung Heroes - Black Boy of Atlanta - Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States.Elizabeth Ross Haynes. G. K. Hall, New York, 1997. Hardcover. 597pp. reprint edition. 3 works republished here from the original printings. From the series African-American Woman Writers 1910-1940. Edited by H.L.Gates, Jr. (rasa). New copy.

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Willie Brown: A Biography. James Richardson. Univ of California Press, Ewing, New Jersey, U.S.A. 509pp. Softcover biography of the controversial Ex Mayor of San Francisco Willie BROWN. Very good condition with very mild coverwear.

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Negro: an Anthology made by Nancy Cunard (1931-1934). Nancy Cunard. New York: Continuum. 1996 Softcover edition. Large quarto. Illustrated wraps. Original edition: London: Wishart & Company, 1934. Nancy Cunard , the only child of Sir Bache Cunard, of the shipping family, was born in 1896. Educated at several exclusive schools, Cunard's poetry first appeared in magazines in 1916. In 1928 Cunard founded Hours Press that published writers such as Richard Aldington, Louis Aragon, George Moore, Robert Graves, Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett. Cunard's relationship with African-American musician, Henry Crowder, caused a major scandal and led to a break with her family. The couple moved to Austria where Cunard wrote the pamphlet, Black Man and White Ladyship (1931). Cunard became involved in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys , where nine young black men were falsely charged with the rape of two white women on a train. In 1934, Nancy Cunard published Negro: An Anthology, which brought together more than two hundred contributions, serving as a plea for racial justice, an exposé of black oppression, and a hymn to black achievement and endurance. The anthology stands as a virtual ethnography of 1930s racial, historic, artistic, political, and economic culture. Samuel Beckett, a close friend of the flamboyant and unconventional Cunard, translated nineteen of the contributions for Negro, constituting Beckett's largest single prose publication. 1000 copies were printed, but a considerable number were destroyed in a warehouse fire and few have survived in good condition. Recently one copy fetched us$ 7,500,-- on the market.

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Africana Woman : Her Story Through Time. Cynthia Jacobs Carter. NEW HARDBACK. 232 X 276mm. 256pp. Uses diary excerpts, songs, poetry, and artwork to celebrate the cultural contributions of women of African descent throughout history.



Sacred Arts of Haitian Voodoo. Donald Cosentino, Los Angeles Fowler Museum of Cultural history.University of California. Describes the exhibition entitled "Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" that was on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York from October 10, 1998 - January 3, 1999. includes event details, images from the exhibition. Details the vodou, or voodoo religion.


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W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade. The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles (Library of America). by W. E. B. Du Bois. Hardcover. Three volumes, cloth with dustjacket. NEW. Historian, sociologist, novelist, editor and political activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. One of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, Du Bois served as that organization's director of publications and editor of Crisis magazine until 1934. In 1944, he returned from Atlanta University to become head of the NAACP's special research department, a post he held until 1948. Dr. Du Bois emigrated to Africa in 1961, and became editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Africana, an enormous publishing venture which had been planned by Kwame Nkrumah, since then deposed as president of Ghana. Du Bois died in Ghana on August 27, 1963, at the age of 95.


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Speech and Power. The African-American essay and its cultural content from polemics to pulpit. Gerald Early (ed). We cannot fully understand black American literature, the black wrriter, or the course of black cultureas an intellectual construct during the 20th century without coming to grips with the meaning and the function of the essay in the hands of the black american. Two volumes (paperback). Contributions by Richard Wright, Henry Louis Gates, James Baldwin and many more. Brand New.

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Just Above My Head. James Baldwin. Penguin paperback 1994. It's true there's a fashion right now for the "big" novel, the one with historical sweep (in Hollywood they call it "high arc"), the family saga or the pseudo-Tolstoyan pseudo-epic with both world wars in it. But not all temptations to bigness and historicity in a novel are corrupt. Especially to the lyrical novelist, to the visionary, they hold out the promise of grounding one's vision in acknowledged reality, of putting solid weight on insights that might otherwise seem too subjective, of giving one's ideas a foundation in known things. It isn't hard to see why James Baldwin in particular has chosen to shape his sixth novel along the lines of a saga in the contemporary mode. His fiction has often been attacked, notably by younger black writers in the 1960's, as too personal, too patently a working-out of inner conflict at the price of distorting the realities of race and racial conflict in America. In a famous chapter in "Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver describes how, after initially being inspired by Baldwin's first novel, "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), he gradually discovered in himself an "aversion" To Baldwin's writing, especially while reading "Another Country" (1962), in which homosexuality nearly displaced race or merged with it at the center of Baldwin's concern. But Cleaver's deepest objection is not homosexuality. The real problem is that Baldwin's fiction is finally "void of a political, economic, or even a social reference." And Cleaver is right about "Another Country." For all its poignance, it takes place almost entirely between the sheets; and Baldwin's sheets, unlike those of Richard Wright (Cleaver's example), enclose a kind of historical preserve. (JOHN ROMANO). Good clean copy.

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Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank. James Campbell. Hardcover. Scribner ISBN 0689121725. Published 1995. 1st edition. Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar Paris: James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious.
) James Campbell is the author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (California, 2002), This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (California, 2001), and Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland (1990). He works for the Times Literary Supplement. Nice hardcover copy with dustjacket in mylar.

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JUNETEENTH. Ralph Ellison. US First edition Hardcover New York: Random House, 1999. A fine copy in a fine dustwrapper, Brand new, unread. Ellison was working on Juneteenth, his second novel (after The Invisible Man), when he died in 1994. Edited by John F. Callahan, literary executor of Ellison"s estate.

The new book comes from a wilder narrative country. If Invisible Man can be called an American Portrait of the Artist, then Juneteenth is Ulysses. It is far more layered and more subtly allusive than its predecessor, depends more heavily on stream-of-consciousness style, and makes greater demands on any reader who would seek to grasp it whole. Nor are the settings of Juneteenth sharply rendered social and physical scenes like the segregated South and the '30s Harlem negotiated by Invisible Man. The landscapes are almost entirely psychological and dialogical, and much easier to get lost in. Finally, the new novel is no bildungsroman chronologically arranged to mirror a child's gradual maturation into a self. Juneteenth is an unbildungsroman if you will, whose formal derangements reflect a grown man's narrowly crafted, carefully managed false self coming undone. Bliss, a child born of a white mother who disappears and a father who is never identified, is raised by a black jazz musician, Hickman, later a revivalist minister. The youth leaves his foster father and his name behind to become an itinerant filmmaker and con artist sometimes called Movie Man. Whether he is actually white or passes for white is left ambiguous, but he looks white. Eventually, having reinvented himself one last time, he gains a seat in the US Congress as Senator Sunraider.

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Black Beauty: A History and Celebration. Ben Arogundade. Avalon, September, 2000. ISBN 1-560-25276-6. The Jazz Age, Prohibition and the Harlem Renaissance are terms associated with the 1920s. However, more than black musicians, writers, and bathtub gin were in vogue then. The fashion of tanned skin was born in the twenties, when sun tan oil was first sold. Coco Chanel, the French designer, started the trend. Clara Bow, sex goddess of silent film, created a sensation in the twenties with her generous lips, an early example that white glamour often owes much to black features--and vice versa. Around the same time in Paris, Josephine Baker was launched into megastardom with a honey-colored body that pleasured the eye. "For the first time ever, universal beauty had a black face," writes Ben Arogundade. Baker, one of many exponents of the type, personifies hybrid beauty. In Black Beauty, Arogundade charts contrasting images of blackness that have generated attention across time and the globe. The Venus Hottentot, whose ample body was exhibited behind bars in London and Paris in 1810, represents unmixed authenticity. The two are played off against each other, but ultimately both are equated with primitive nature. Grace Jones, who was displayed inside a cage in the eighties was also promoted as primitive. In the nineties, the black blondes, like Lil'Kim, Mary J. Blige and Ru Paul, have redefined the ultimate emblem of white beauty and manifested black arrival in the game of racial masking. Arogundade, a Nigerian journalist, has written a well-researched book in simple but affecting language. Not only is the volume full of stunning photographs, but there are historical revelations as well. Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" had Africa in her genes, and thanks to an eighteenth century mulatto queen from Germany, a proverbial drop of African blood colors the lineage of the English Royals. At the heart of Arogundade's historical survey is the struggle of black beauty to dictate its terms, not be demeaned or scrapped for the benefit of others. Antiquarian. €30,--


Black Suicide. Herbert Hendin. Basic Books, 1969. New York. Hardcover DJ. Most people, both white and black, are suprised to learn that anobg young urban Negroes suicide is a serious problem. In fact, suicide rate among young black males in New York city is almost twice as high as it is for white males in the same age group. This book shows how suicide has radically different significance for young urban blacks than for their white counterparts. Good copy in dustjacket.

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Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Hilton Als, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, James Allen (Editor). Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishing Hardcover 1st Printing. 212 pages. Published in 2000. Landmark collection of "found" and "collected" black-and-white photographs. One of the greatest photography books of the new century.n 2000. Vintage photographs selected by the editors. Edited by James Allen with contributions by some of America"s leading scholars, historians, and photography experts. In pictorial DJ with large flaps and white titles printed on the spine, as issued. Presents the most harrowing and most compelling photographic document on one of the most shameful chapters in American history. The only poignant thing about this book is its title. Upon its quiet release in 2000 (it was deemed inappropriate to promote it), the shock and horror that greeted the book in stores and online have been unprecedented. The publisher's blurb and collation of excerpted reviews are exceptionally telling: "In the years before federal anti-lynching laws were passed, an enthusiastic reign of racial terror swept through America. Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe, do not want to believe, that such atrocities happened in America not very long ago. These photographs bear witness to an American Holocaust. A great and terrible book. It's an album of peacetime atrocities, during which hundreds of Kodaks clicked. These images refute the notion that photographs of charged historical subjects lose their power. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society". The Tuskegee Institute has records of the lynching of 3436 blacks between 1882 and the 1950's. This is a small percentage of the actual number of murders that occurred, which were seldom reported and eventually led to the creation of the NAACP, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws. Through all this terror and carnage, someone, often a professional photographer, carried a camera and took pictures of the event for souvenir-keeping rather than with an eye for posterity. The lynching photographs were made into postcards and sold briskly as souvenirs to the enthusiastic crowds in attendance. The photograph of two black men hanging from a tree surrounded by a large, all-smiles, all-white crowd is now considered among the most crucial pictures ever taken in the history of photography. A man is pointing an accusatory finger at the hanged men, as if to say, "This is the fate you blacks will meet and deserve". Critics consider "Without Sanctuary" to be the most important photography book published in the new century thus far, a vindication-of-sorts of photography's importance and a scathing indictment of modern American society. A record that can only be ignored or wished away at our grave peril. 100 black-and-white photographic reproductions. A flawless collectible copy. Please be aware before opening the book that much of the material is very VERY disturbing.

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In Search of Hannah Crafts. CriticaL essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative. Henry Louis Gates. Millbooks Basic Books. 2004. Hard Cover. 480pp. Top African-American Studies scholars examine the history and reception of The Bondwoman"s Narrative, the slave narrative that, since its discovery, has changed how we view antebellum literature. Three years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black women anywhere. The Bondwoman's Narrative was published in 2002. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings together twenty-two authorities on African-American studies to examine such issues as authenticity, and the history and criticism of this unique novel, including Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Shelley Fisher-Fishkin. The Bondwoman's Narrative will take its place in the African-American canon, and In Search of Hannah Crafts is the book that scholars and students of African-American Studies, of women writers, and of slavery, need to have to understand this unprecedented historical and literary event.

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In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Kwame Anthony Appiah. Oxford University Press, 1993. Softcover. "There is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us," Mr. Appiah writes in this well-researched and beautifully argued book. Yet as a concept, "race" is -- like the notion of "force" -- a phenomenon so culturally sedimented and overworked that it seems to resist systematic investigation, and we lament, as Augustine did when pondering the nature of time, "If no one ask me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." But Mr. Appiah, a Cambridge-educated philosopher who is now a professor of African-American studies at Harvard University, understands that every idea has its biography. So he returns us in his opening essays, "The Invention of Africa" and "Illusions of Race," to the seeds of Pan-Africanism sown in the 19th century by two African-Americans, Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois. Analyzing their most important speeches, Mr. Appiah concludes that both men accepted a conventional notion of racial nationalism based on a romantic, European definition of the Negro. "The very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism," Mr. Appiah writes. "The notion of Pan-Africanism was founded on the notion of the African, which was, in turn, founded not on any genuine cultural commonality but . on the very European concept of the Negro. . . . The very category of the Negro is at root a European product: for the 'whites' invented the Negroes in order to dominate them." Accepting the illusion of race as a classificatory notion, Du Bois concluded in "The Conservation of Races" that each race has its unique "message" for civilization, and he wondered -- and kept us wondering for nearly a century -- what the mission of the Negro might be. For Mr. Appiah, this search for a unique racial destiny is much like the 19th-century quest for phlogiston, or the recent furor over cold fusion. Du Bois and Crummell began, he says, with an "ennobling lie" that may satisfy the heart's yearning for black unity but ignores all we have learned from genetics and flies in the face of what Mr. Appiah, as an African, intuitively knows: "Whatever Africans share, we do not have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual vocabulary. . . . We do not even belong to a common race." A very important book!!

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100 Amazing Facts about the Negro, with complete proof. J. A. Rogers (1883 - 1966) was born in Jamaica. He immigrated to the United States in 1906 and became a naturalized citizen in 1917. Rogers observed: "I had noticed that some of my schoolmates were unmixed blacks and were, some of them, more brilliant than some of the white ones." This realization that the doctrine of white superiority was contradicted by the talent and expertise of Black intellect inspired Rogers to begin his research into the Black experience.
J.A. Rogers published his first book, the 87 page "From Superman to Man" in 1917. At the time he wrote the book, he was working as a Pullman porter out of Chicago. Rogers had gone to Chicago to Study art. Rogers was one of the first and few African historians to use art extensively in helping to validate the achievements of African people.

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BLACK FILM STARS. EILEEN LANDAY. DRAKE, 1973. Hardcover 8vo. Cloth plus dustjacket. 194pp. VERY GOOD COPY. No marks. "This book is for the learning tree." Excellent piece of scholarship on a neglected subject.

"For blacks in films, as in every other area of American life, the journey out of the shadows of neglect into the bright light of recognition and acclaim has been a long and difficult one. Black Film Stars tells teh story of this journey in full and fascinating detail as it chronicles the lives of thirty of the most famous and succesful black authors and actresses, from the earliest pioneers Hollywood to today's leading box attractions."

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson * Paul Robeson * Ethel Waters * Diana Ross * Jim Brown * Sidney Poitiers * Harry Belafonte * Cicely Tyson *
and more...

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