Races Books

If you're interested in attending law school, if you're interested in the story of the civil rights movement, if you're looking for inspiration, if you're in search of a calling, if you enjoy drama or comedy, or if you simply enjoy a good book -- read Crusaders in the Courts. I was moved, outraged and inspired. Jack Greenberg brings the journey of these brave men and women (including himself) to life. The book is written very well and it is very accessible. If you're a teacher, tell your students to read this book. If you're a parent, your children should read it. The book puts the movement in perspective and introduces a whole new generation to the wonders of a band of lawyers committed to changing the future.

This book is the only one written by a lawyer who argued in Brown v. Board of Education. Before his 28th birthday, Jack Greenberg argued the first of more than 40 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. Starting as Thurgood Marshall's assistant, he became Marshall's chosen successor as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His cases involved sit-ins and freedom riders, school segregation, capital punishment and affirmative action. He represented Martin Luther King in Birmingham and in his march from Selma to Montgomery. Much more than a book about the law, "Crusaders" describes the personalities, inter-organizational conflicts,and the conflict within the Legal Defense Fund over his refusal to represent Angela Davis. It also discusses the boycott of his class at Harvard Law School by black students because he was white, It includes new material about school integration of Roma (Gypsies) in Eastern Europe, the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action decisions, and his observations about schools today and their failure to educate black children. A fascinating analysis about how law develops and a good read.

The book I received was in great condition. The pages weren't bent and I don't think there was any/or much highlighting or writing from what I've noticed so far. If other reviews are this consistent, I would recommend purchasing from this seller.

Several years ago, I adopted this textbook for the course I teach in cross-cultural counseling. I have not regreted that decision since. This deceptively thin and relatively inexpensive text is jammed full of up-to-date and useful information about cross cultural counseling, diagnosis and assessment. The writing style is clear and concise. It is highly readable, because the author does not go out of his way to impress the reader with his extensive vocabulary. He uses plain English whenever possible. The interviews with the experienced "ethnic counselors" are interesting, insightful and thought-provoking. The content gets repetitive at times, but I believe that is probably done in an effort to drive home important points for students and readers. Similarities and differences between various ethnic groups becomes very apparent and the practical issues that arise as a result of those differences are addressed. The history of each minority ethnic groups is examined and the carry-over effects are discussed. In short, I love this text and intend to continue using it for a long time. I just hope that they don't stop publishing it. That would be a shame. If you are loooking for a cheap, yet detailed book on cross-cultural counseling this is the book for you.

This book addresses the dominant ideology in a way we can all understand. Dr. Kharem brings reality to challenges facing education systems in America. I highly recommend this book for anyone planning to teach in the United States.

I`ve never read a book that opened my eyes and managed to keep my attention throughtout the entire reading process. How amazingly true. Mr.Kharem did a wonderful job keeping the reading daringly truthful and simple. I applaued him and hope it won`t be long before he writes more. He could truly change the course of education and perhaps history with books such as these.

This IS probably one of the VERY BEST books that I have EVER read. I highly recommend buying this book.

This book was written as a fiction and yet the religious sections in it are very pleasing to the heart of Christians. The Author should get ready to write a "follow-up" on this one!

Marie Dallam's book "Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and his House of Prayer" is an outstanding, well written and well researched book. This is the first objective scholarly analysis of Daddy Grace and the House of Prayer that clearly explains the origins of many of the House of Prayer practices and customs and attempts to delve into who Daddy Grace was as a person.

It has been over 40 years since the death of Daddy Grace, yet there still many myths and misunderstandings about Daddy Grace and the House of Prayer. Many view Daddy Grace as a cult leader or sometimes confuse him with Father Divine. Dallam clearly and concisely explains why the House of Prayer should not be classified as a cult and explains the distinctions between the House of Prayer and the Church founded by Father Divine.

For members, this book is a must read, if you want to have a sound understanding of our founding father, the evolution of the House of Prayer, and to become aware of certain organizational areas that need improvement. More importantly, I think the book will help all members understand that we have a rich heritage that we should be proud of and that we must work to continually enhance all aspects of our faith.

Elder E.C. Smith, Member of the United House of Prayer for All People, Washington, D.C.

I received my books in a few days. They were brand new with no surprises.

This is the most sympathetic and healthy accounts of Palestinian Arabs you're ever likely to encounter. Written with disarming simplicity. I assign this book to my classes whenever possible.

Wonderful book. Gives a very insightful summary of the history of Israel from an Arab perspective on a personal scale. The author envelopes you into the story of one ordinary family's life from life in the British mandate through the beginning of the Intifadah. As well as being a description of Arab life within Israel, this book also provides interesting material about the life of small-scale agriculturalists in Arabia.

I happen to come across this book quite by accident at the library one day. I couldn't check it out at the time, but once I could, I went right back and got that book, and I tell you, this is no ordinary welfare mother, but then again, who is? or who isn't? Richeline was born in Georgia, finished high school in South Philadelphia, got married and ended up in New Britain, Connecticut with seven kids. She resolved for 1973 to write a journal of her life and concerns, and that she did. One of the entries while discussing her financial woes, she muses if she sold this journal what would it profit? sadly, she didn't live to see the results. She speaks of not being able to work for herself(although she does work parttime at a dry cleaners)and giving her body to science as a sort of payback, writing letters to the local newspaper editor and seeing them published as well. She yearns that her children would break the cycle and become better adults, and at the end of the book, there is a section on what happened to her children. She also talks about her health. She suffered from seizures, and she valiantly tried to keep it from her kids. Nevertheless, after reading this book, one would think twice about labeling someone a welfare queen or what have you. Richeline Mitchell may have been a welfare mother, but I believe she was far more than that. A great book and highly recommended for all.

The book Dear Self is an excellent book that everyone should read. It really draws the reader into never wanting to put it down. It appeals to people of every upbringing, age, and culture. The reader will feel as though they have experienced what the very writer has gone through. The emotions of sadness, happiness, and times of struggle have an immense affect on any person who reads this book. Superbly put together, Dear Self proves that with struggle there is ease. Richelene Mitchell, who documents these stories in a diary, proves that, although everyone has struggles or difficulties in life, with determination, patience, and acceptance of those struggles, one will succeed. What I found amazing about the writer was the fact that she never expressed pain throughout her illness of epilepsy. She continued to provide for her seven children, with endless love and support. This is most definitely a book that everyone can learn at least one lesson from, especially through the writer's strength, patience, and courage.

When your typical blues fan thinks of cities that were important to the development of this great art form, he usually thinks of Chicago and maybe Memphis. However, Alan Govenar and Jay Brakefield make the case for Dallas, Texas as a major center for the developement of the blues in no uncertain terms. Of course, Deep Ellum and Central Track is not a blues book per se, but rather a well researched historical and sociological treatise on the birth and development of Big D's Deep Ellum and Central Track districts from the earliest days to the present. The authors use lots of primary source interviews with the surviving denizens of this fascinating area of town and paint a truly engaging picture of the lifestyles and business practices of these predominantly black and Jewish areas, particularly around the 1920's heyday of the earliest great blues artists. Such immortal founding fathers as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson and "Oak Cliff" T-Bone Walker were crucial to the growth of the art form, and these and innumerable lesser artists are covered in meticulous and loving detail. The authors also spend plenty of time covering contributors to the local jazz and country music scenes as well, particularly jazz hornman Buster Smith, and country pickers the Light Crust Doughboys, where western swing icon Bob Wills got his start. Even though the work has a decidedly scholarly bent, the numerous stories of such colorful characters as gambling mogul Benny Binion and mammoth shoeshine entrepreneur "Open the Door Richard", provide enough reading pleasure to keep even casual fans enthralled. Researchers will love the nearly one hundred pages of source appendices, and fans of history, sociology, music, and Big D will all want to read this book as soon as possible, for it proves, among other things, that Dallas, Texas was and is a fascinating city, as well as a major contributor to the history of the blues art form.

This is a well researched and well written description of a time and place in Dallas in the 20's and 30's that has long been overdue. The history of blues, jazz, gospel and country was written in Deep Ellum. It was a "good read", and I recommend it highly.

The 1898 "race riot," of Wilmington, NC, which more correctly should be understood for what it really was, "an ongoing white pogrom against blacks," or "a white supremacist insurrection against a legitimately elected interracial government," remains an enduring metaphor for how, "at every appropriate opportunity throughout American history," white Americans have, even today, found ways to betray democracy in the name of the dying ideology of white supremacy. America's imperceptibly slow evolution towards democracy has been nothing if not an uphill struggle against the reactionary forces of "white resistance" to "true democracy."

Never was the white intent to resist change towards democracy, social and political justice and equality, more raw, open and obvious, never more starkly and conscientiously used to snuff out democracy, nor more brutal, than in the 1898 Wilmington "white vigilante resurrection." And for those who might think that this was but an accident or aberration of American history, the attacks on the duly elected government of Wilmington were typical of the times. As always, they rallied the anti-democratic forces to action in the local churches. Even today, the white instigators of the 1898 riots are still very much revered: taught about in schools as heroes, with statutes of them standing tall in the town square.

Unlike today, when the U.S. has become little more than a "greater co-prosperity sphere" for the "moneyed (mostly) foreign interests of the global economy" such as the Saudi Royal family, Christian and Jewish Zionists, and now for Communist Chinese economic expansion, there was once a time, when "true democracy" was about to break out in America. Never was there a more pregnant time for it to do so than in 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Story

More than a century ago, in the aftermath of the "race riots" of 1871 in Cape Fear North Carolina, where the river ran red with the blood of its black victims, a historic experiment in interracial democracy blossomed in Wilmington, NC. Although Wilmington was composed of a thriving black majority, one of the few in all of the U.S. at that time (and now at any time), its government nevertheless was composed of a coalition of both races.

This coalition of "working level" blacks and whites, an unheard of democratic oasis in a desert of southern racist reaction, posed a threat not just to white supremacy, but also to the "Southern planter and Northern industrial class" that had traditionally run the Southern slave system that "pitted" white workers against "black slaves." [The global economy now carries out a similar program, writ large.]

In the 1898 elections, when these conservative forces failed to undo the interracial coalition at the ballot box, they sought to do so by "the gun." (giving a paradoxical twist and echo to Malcolm X's refrain: The Ballot or the Bullet). And out of the ashes of the ensuing coup d'etat was born a century of Jim Crow and Apartheid, American style.

And as Paul Harvey would say "the rest of the story" is that even today, when we have both a "Black man" and a "White woman" running for the U.S. Presidency, just beneath the veneer of racial tranquility, America remains more like "post riot Wilmington" than like the interracial coalition that the reactionary vigilante forces overthrew in 1898.

As the authors noted so carefully in the preface: " the past seems not to have receded significantly, even today. In some very fundamental ways, change [towards democracy] has come slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly [so]."

An important book with many perceptive and cautionary lessons for our still racially tense and constipated times. A true five star effort.



An important book with many perceptive and cautionary lessons for our still racially tense and constipated times. A true five star effort.

First let me say that I rarely read non-fiction and even when I do, I rarely manage to finish an entire book of it. Democracy Betrayed is an exception. The writing was clear, precise, right-on, and interesting. And, perhaps most importantly, educational. I was born and raised in North Carolina and knew nothing--absolutely nothing--about the Wilmington Race Riots or the subject of Cecelski's essay Abraham Galloway. I am female and was a victim of gender based racial violence myself so I was aware of the issues raised in Gilmore's essay and White's essay, but I have never seen the issues written about so well. What I most like about this book is that it destroys stereotypes about class and race. After all isn't it the most well-to-do who most benefit from race violence so why should we be surprised to learn that it was not the so-called "white trash" who began the racial massacre in 1898, but the rich, the ones who were most likely to benefit from forcing the elected fusionist party officials out of office and placing themselves in their offices. I never knew--it certainly wasn't taught in my public school--that in 1896 every office in North Carolina was held by a progressive fusionist party member, elected by the fusion of lower class whites and blacks. Imagine how different this state would be, how advanced in talent and intelligence, if the massacre hadn't occurred, if black doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, newspaper editors and writers, etc, hadn't been forced from the state and if the elected officials had been allowed to remain in office. Perhaps what is most important is the book succeeds in "drawing public attention to the tragedy", a tragedy that is apparantly very much in the consciousness of Black Wilmington citizens and very much needs to be in the consciousness of all humans.

This book truly changed my life when I enrolled at the University of Virginia during the civil rights years of the 1960s. It was in many ways a roadmap for me during those contentious times. Nowadays whenever I see an old copy at a booksale, I buy it and pass it on. If only there had been hundreds, thousands, like it, the history of the south might have been so much better in the twentieth century. I remember hearing Sarah Patton Boyle speak on campus, and sitting next to her at a church service after President Kennedy was assassinated. I guess what I want to say is that so many books are paper and ink (and some of them tragic wastes of good trees)--and then there are the others. This is one of the others. I recommend it highly. In fact, I have recommended it to the Modern Library for their list of the hundred most important nonfiction books of the century.

Sarah Patton Boyle was a white person born into one of Virginia's "best families." During the 1950s and 60s Boyle became an activist for African American Civil Rights in Virginia. This book beautifully narrates Boyle's awakening to the plight of African Americans, and her response. An honest and forthright account, Boyle details the inner anxieties of a person moving from one world view to another. She chronicles her childhood and indoctrination with the repressive "Southern Code" that guided race relations in the South. According to Boyle, the Southern Code allowed whites to think of themselves as gracious and generous paternalists while economically exploiting African Americans. Not until the 1950s did she see how racist and dehumanizing the whole scheme was. When she did she became an activist in the Civil Rights movement. In the process she lost her belief not only in the goodness of white southerners, but in the goodness of humanity in general. She moved more towards an orthodox Christian worldview that stressed on the one hand the sinfulness of mankind and on the other the need for a strong commitment to love. This book definitely deserves to be considered a signigicant piece of Southern literature and a valuable resource for those interested in understanding the complex history of southern race relations. -Vernon Horn