Home Title Index Topic Index Sources Directory News Releases Sources Calendar RSS Sources Select News RSS Feed

Black History & Identity
AlterLinks Topic Index

  1. African American Folksong and American Cultural Politics: The Lawrence Gellert Story
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2013
    Story of the collection of African American folk music compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Compiled between the World Wars, the recordings were adopted by the American Left as the voice of the American proletariat, or "songs of protest."
  2. African-American Self-Defense
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    A review of Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s book, "This Non-violent Stuff'll Get You Killed" on the role of guns in the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.
  3. Albert Woodfox, Gary Tyler
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Albert Woodfox, Gary Tyler - two examples among many of what the racist and bureaucratic "carceral state" in America is about.
  4. American Negro Slavery (Third Edition)
    A Modern Reader

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1979
    Incorporating significant and at times controversial literature on questions about the institution of slavery and the social and cultural response of the slaves to their enslavement, this collection offers thirteen readings, eight of them new to this edition.
  5. Assata
    An Autobiography

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1989
    On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimard, lay in the hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed while local, state and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of an FBI campaign to harass Black nationalist organizations she was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977.
  6. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1965
    The personal story of the man who become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution in the United States, completed shortly before his assassination.
  7. Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient Views of Blacks
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1991
    In this richly-illustrated account of black-white contacts from the Pharaohs to the Caesars, Frank M. Snowden demonstrates that the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because of their colour. For three thousand years Mediterranean whites intermittently came in contact with African blacks in commerce and war, and left a record of these encounters in art and in written documents. The blacks -- most commonly known as Kushites, Ethiopians, or Nubians -- were redoubtable warriors and commanded the respect of their white adversaries. The overall view of blacks was highly favourable. In science, philosophy, and religion colour was not the basis of theories concerning inferior peoples.
  8. The Black Belt Communists
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    During the Great Depression, black sharecroppers and the Communist Party waged war against tenant farming in the South.
  9. Black Canadians
    A Long Line of Fighters

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1975
    Discusses the roles played by black Canadians in history.
  10. Black History and the Class Struggle
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2005
    Articles include: "A Life in the Black Panther Party — We Want Freedom — A Review of a Book by Mumia Abu-Jamal," "How the Liberals and Reformists Derailed the Struggle for Integration — For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!", "The 'N' Word in Racist America."
  11. Black Immigrants, 'Model' Minority? Plus: Don Imus
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2008
    'Black' is a label which obscures more than it illuminates.
  12. Black Indians
    A Hidden Heritage

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1997
    Explores the story of black Indians, defined here as people with dual African and Native American ancestry or African Americans who lived primarily with Native Americans.
  13. The Black Infinity Complex
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    We're a group of UCLA grad students, and our vision of the Black Infinity Complex is inspired by the boundlessness and sustainability of Black creativity and imagination. It's a collective of organizers coming together as a liaison to create a united front of existing structures of grassroots organizations and community institutions, and organizers like you, or scholars.
  14. The Black Jacobins
    Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1963
    An account of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803.
  15. Black Liberation and the Fight for a Socialist America
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2010
    From slavery to convict labour, from the chain gang to the assembly line, American capitalism has been built upon the lash-scarred backs of black labour. Any organization that claims a revolutionary perspective for the United States must confront the special oppression of black people and their forced segregation at the bottom of capitalist society and the poisonous racism that divides the working class and cripples its struggles.
  16. Black Loyalist
    Wikipedia article

    Resource Type: Article
    A Black Loyalist was an inhabitant of British America of African descent who joined British colonial forces during the American Revolutionary War.[1] Many had been enslaved by the "Patriot" rebels and decided to join the British in return for promises of freedom.
  17. Black Panthers and other Histories Video and Audio Recordings
    Resource Type: Website
  18. Booker's Place
    A Mississippi Story

    Resource Type: Film/Video
    Published: 2012
    In 1965, African-American waiter Booker Wright spoke out in a television documentary, outraging many white Southerners and resulting in his murder. Years later, the filmmaker's son returns to examine the repercussions of the interview on Wright's family and the community as a whole.
  19. Bowling Alone
    The Collapse and Revival of American Community

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2000
    Bowling Alone documents the rise and fall of community activity in the twentieth century in the United States and the social changes this reflects. It offers all the evidence, the confirmatory and the contradictory, to give a complete look at trends of community involvement and how increased social capital can benefit everybody.
  20. Challenging the Mississippi Fire Bombers
    Memories of Mississippi 1964-65

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2013
    With a firsthand account of the details and thoughtful descriptions of key people on the front lines, author Jim Dann brings the historic period, the June 1964 civil rights struggle to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi, back to life. He places those 15 months in Mississippi in the overall history of the struggle of African Americans for freedom, equality, and democratic rights in the South, the country, and throughout the world.
  21. Class Notes
    Posing As Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2001
    Reed argues against the solipsistic approaches of cultural or identity politics, and in favour of class-based political interpretation and action. Class Notes moves on to tackle race relations, ethnic studies, family values, welfare reform, the so-called underclass, and black public intellectuals.
  22. Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom: Part Two
    Marxism vs. the Myth of "White Skin Privilege"

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers.
  23. Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom: Part One
    The Roots of Black Oppression

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The purpose of this talk is to motivate a Marxist materialist program for the fight for black freedom as opposed to the idealism embodied in both black nationalism and guilty white liberalism, including the concept of “white skin privilege,” which falsely substitutes individual psychology for struggle against the racial oppression rooted in the capitalist profit system. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integration including mobilizing the working class against every manifestation of racial oppression. This approach is counterposed to liberal integration, which is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained within the confines of this class society founded on black oppression.
  24. The Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement
    For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2010
    The mass mobilization of black people in the Southern civil rights movement, and the subsequent Northern ghetto rebellions, disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. It shattered the anti-Communist consensus and it paved the road for the mass protest movements that followed—against the U.S. dirty war in Vietnam, for the rights of women, gays, students and others.
  25. Connexions
    Volume 5, Number 3 - September 1980 - Racism/Racisme

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 1980
  26. Connexions Library: Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Multiculturalism Focus
    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2009
    Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on race, racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism, identity.
  27. The day the Klan messed with the wrong people
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2010
    By the mid-1950's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. James W. "Catfish" Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, made a critical mistake that couldn't be avoided by a racist mind - he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.
  28. Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom Part One
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    Reconstruction was a tumultuous, brief and extraordinary period of American history defined by an unprecedented experiment in interracial democracy. It was an era of exceptional developments, all taking place simultaneously and impacting one another.
  29. Defeat of Reconstruction and the Betrayal of Black Freedom Part Two
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    During Reconstruction, black people fought to assert their American-ness. Throughout the South, it was blacks and their allies who would march, parade and celebrate the Fourth of July, but not out of gross and vulgar American patriotism. Rather, it was part of a struggle to uphold the ideals of freedom and liberty that came with the Civil War and the promise of equality that came with Reconstruction.
  30. Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights
    Resource Type: Book
  31. Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History
    Resource Type: Book
  32. False Promises
    The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1973
  33. Five Centuries of Imperialism and Resistance
    Vol. 8: 1492-1992

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1992
    A collection of poems and essays giving various perspectives on resistance to imperialism and capitalism.
  34. For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Part Two
    How the Liberals and Reformists Derailed the Struggle for Integration

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2004
    There is a lot of talk today about multiculturalism, diversity, whiteness and "racialized subjects" and other liberal jargon that essentially attempts to erase the centrality of anti-black racism and black oppression in racist capitalist America.
  35. For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Part One
    Contradictions of the Civil Rights Movement: A Marxist Analysis

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2012
    We describe the black population in the U.S. as an oppressed race-color caste. From their arrival in this country, the Negro people have been an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom of this society. Thus blacks face discrimination, in different degrees, regardless of social status, wealth or class position. Blacks are today still an integral and strategic part of the working class, despite unemployment and mass incarceration.
  36. The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr.
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2018
    King believed that a multiracial working-class movement was required to overcome the failings of capitalism.
  37. Freedom Riders
    1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2006
  38. Freedom rides
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    Freedom Riders were Civil Rights activists who rode on interstate buses into the segregated southern United States.
  39. Freedom Summer
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi, which up to that time had almost totally excluded black voters.
  40. From Ferguson to Baltimore
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Combined with racial profiling, combined with the practice of predatory profiling and predatory policing, police departments are using parking and traffic tickets as a revenue base to increase their budget. All these bring us to a place where police violence is rampant. The more contacts you have with the police, the more possibilities you have of being subject to a violent interaction.
  41. From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    As is ever clearer and ever more important to note, race politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do.
  42. Harlem is Nowhere
    A Journey to the Mecca of Black America

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2011
    Harlem as a race capital has been subject to representational overload. The author's memoir/social history attempts to free the neighbourhood from this burden and reveal its more obscures figures.
  43. Tim Hector
    A Caribbean Radical's Story

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2006
    An account of the life of Antiguan activist Tim Hector.
  44. Heresies Sex Issue
    Heresies #12

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 1981
  45. A history of American lynchings
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    A soil collection project is commemorating the forgotten victims of lynching and helping to tell their stories.
  46. I Am Not Your Negro
    Resource Type: Film/Video
    Published: 2017
    I am Not your Negro explores the history of racism in the United States through James Baldwin's reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as his personal observations of American history.
  47. In Memoriam: Bobby Lee, Black Panther
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Hy Thurman remembers Bobby Lee.
  48. James, C.L.R. - Writings - Index
    Resource Type: Article
    Writings of C.L.R. James (1901-1989).
  49. Journey of Reconciliation
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    An attempt in 1947 to challenge segregation laws on interstate buses in the Southern United States, through non-violent direct action.
  50. League of Revolutionary Black Workers
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
  51. Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement (Part One)
    Police Terror and Black Oppression

    Resource Type: Unclassified
    Published: 2015
    Police reform is a hoax and a hustle. Federal investigations go nowhere and the Democrats are simply the soft cops of the capitalist system. There is no road to black liberation and the liberation of all working people short of workers revolution.
  52. The limits of anti-racism
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2009
    The contemporary discourse of 'antiracism' is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality -- whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of 'racism' -- over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither 'overcoming racism' nor 'rejecting whiteness' qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the 'revolution' or urging God's heavenly intervention.
  53. The Lost Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    A discussion of the Haitian revolution, read through the lens of Julia Gaffield's paper on the lost and found Haitian Declaration of Independence.
  54. Made in America
    An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1994
    A history of American English.
  55. The Making of Jericho Road
    Against The Current vol. 132

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2008
    An interview with Michael Honey. The paperback edition of Michael Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign is released this January 2008.
  56. Malcolm X
    The Man and His Ideas

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1965
  57. Malcolm X Research Site
    Resource Type: Website
    A comprehensive website on the life and legacy of Malcolm X , with text, film, video, graphics and more, plus a large listing of African American scholars on the left, with links to their sites and works.
  58. Moral Appeals Aren't Enough
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The wonderful thing about Black Lives Matter is that they're saying you cannot use moral suasion to win this. You've got to disrupt, and make sure that things don't work in order to make the demand for change.
  59. The Movement Has a History
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    I was born in the '70s in East Oakland. All of our parents are Panthers, or Black Power organizers, or organizers. We come out politicized.
  60. Negroes in the Civil War
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1943
    The struggle of the Negro masses derives its peculiar intensity from the simple fact that what they are struggling for is not abstract but is always perfectly visible around them. In their instinctive revolutionary efforts for freedom, the escaping slaves had helped powerfully to begin and now those who remained behind had helped powerfully to conclude, the self-destructive course of the slave power.
  61. On Roediger's Wages of Whiteness
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2002
    An extended discussion and critique of David Roediger's book Wages of Whiteness. Allen writes: "David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, because of its almost universal acceptance for use in colleges and universities, has served as the single most effective instrument in the socially necessary consciousness-raising function of objectifying 'whiteness,' and in popularizing the 'race-as-a-social-construct' thesis. As one who has been the beneficiary of kind supportive comments from him for my own efforts in this field of historical investigation, I undertake this critical essay with no other purpose than furthering the our common aim of the disestablishment of white identity, and the overthrow of white supremacism in general."
  62. 150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation
    Finish the Civil War!

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    The Emancipation Proclamation was a pledge, a promise. It only freed slaves in areas that were not yet controlled by Union armies, true enough. But in that sense it was like the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which didn’t make any of the colonies free—it took a victorious war to free the colonies from British rule. The Emancipation Proclamation bound the defense of the Union to the destruction of slavery.
  63. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 10, 2015
    Labour Day issue

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2015
    Labour Day issue, with articles examining the relentless pressure put on workers to work ever longer hours, at the cost of their health and family life; anti-worker legislation, Zapatista popular education, and the Greek crisis.
  64. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - February 20, 2016
    Connexions Enters Its Fifth Decade

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    This issue of Connexions Other Voices falls on the 40th anniversary of the publication of the very first Connexions newsletter, which was published in February 1976. That first issue carried the title "Canadian Information Sharing Service", which was also the name of the collective which compiled it, from submissions from across Canada. Within a couple of years, the name of the publication became "Connexions" and then, a little later, "The Connexions Digest".
    In addition to our own history, in this issue we spotlight black history as our topic of the week. We look at the Haitian revolution, when slaves confronted the French empire and won; black resistance against the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, and the meaning and limits of anti-racism. We also look at the Kurdish liberation movement in Rojava, the dangers posed by geoengineering, and we mark the publication of the Communist Manifesto on February 21, 1848.
  65. Our Movement Is Global
    an interview with Alice Ragland

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Against the Current interviewed Alice Ragland, who has been central to organizing Black youth in Cleveland against the police murder of Tamir Rice, the 12-year old shot to death two seconds after the police arrived at the park where Rice was playing with a toy gun.
  66. Passionate Declarations
    Essays on War and Justice

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2003
    Essays looking at American political ideology.
  67. A People's History of the United States
    1492 - Present

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2003
    Zinn's history includes those most ignored by typical American textbook history, including Indians, blacks, women and workers.
  68. Randolph, A. Philip
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    African-American civil rights leader. (1889-1979).
  69. The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1948
    The impetus of the Negro movement toward the revolutionary forces, which we have traced in the past, is stronger today than ever before.
  70. The Right of Self-Determination and the Negro in the United States of North Americas
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1939
  71. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
    Resource Type: Organization
    The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a national research library devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world.
  72. Seeds of Fire
    A People's Chronology

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
  73. The Seminole-African Alliance
    World News Trust

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    The Native American Indian people that comprised the Seminole Nation grew out of the Creek Nation in Florida. Multilingual and diverse, the Seminoles (from a word meaning “runaway”) became infamous for intermingling with runaway slaves from Georgia and the Carolinas… slaves that built prosperous, free, self-governing communities since 1738.
  74. Seven News
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 1970
    Seven News (7 News) was a community newspaper published in the area of Toronto east of downtown which at the time was known as Ward 7. Seven News was published from 1970 to 1985. Seven News is no longer publishing, but all issues of the paper have been scanned and are available on the Connexions website.
    Ward 7 covered the area of Toronto east of downtown, from Sherbourne Street to Logan Avenue, south of Bloor-Danforth, including Don Vale, Cabbagetown, Regent Park, Riverdale, St. Jamestown.
  75. SNCC
    The New Abolitionists

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1965
    An account of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
  76. SNCC's 50-Year Legacy
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2010
    Celebrating SNCC's legacy.
  77. Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2010
    Peter Fryer reveals how Africans, Asians and their descendants, previously hidden from history, have profoundly influenced and shaped events in Britain over the course of the last two thousand years.
  78. This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
    How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2014
    Charles Cobb, a veteran civil rights activist who served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the American South, unfolds a powerful narrative about Southern grass-roots black individuals and groups who played essential roles in African-American resistance. He reveals how they acted to protect black people and their allies throughout the ages with the careful use of violent self-defense methods.
  79. The Ties that Bind
    African-American Consciousness of Africa

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1989
    Magubane argues that objectively and subjectively the struggle of Black Americans to capture their place in the sun is linked to the liberation movements of Africa, especially Southern Africa. Magubane offers an analysis of the African-American consciousness of Africa and its consequences for Black self-knowledge, pride and nationalism for the U.S.
  80. Turner, Nat
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    American slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831. (1800-1831).
  81. UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project: The Black Panther Party
    Resource Type: Audio
    The UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project is a partnership between the UC Berkeley Library, the Pacifica Foundation, and other private and institutional sources. The intent of the project is to gather, catalog, and make accessible primary source media resources related to social activism and activist movements in California in the 1960's and 1970's.
  82. Under a Soprano Sky
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1989
    Sanchez's poetry combines her pristine lyricism with her strong voice and black female themes to challenge not only the effete definition of poetry, but also the very intellectual hyprocrisy which underguards that effetism. In her poetry, Sonia Sanchez, keenly attuned to the changing moods of the Black community, attests to the continued depth and breadth of her castigation of the social, political and economic evils that stifle the human spirit.
  83. The Warmth of Other Suns
    The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2010
    Wilkerson chronicles the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of the United States.
  84. What is the Left?
    Resource Type: Article
    Stephens argues that class struggle is central to overcoming oppression.
  85. What You Don't Know About Abolitionism: An Interview with Manisha Sinha on Her Groundbreaking Study
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2018
    Manisha Sinha draws attention to the role of Black abolitionists in ending slavery in the USA in her book: The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition.
  86. Why Black Lives Matter Is Game Change
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The Cleveland Black Lives Matter Convening was a "game changer" because it made clear the Movement is long term. Whether its next step will add a call for a break with the two-party system, time and struggle will tell.
  87. Why the Newberry Library Is Collecting Black Lives Matter Artifacts
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Archivists hope to crowdsource historical documentation of today's civil-rights movements.

Experts on Black History & Identity in the Sources Directory

  1. Canadian Encyclopedia
  2. National Archives of the United States

Sources-journalists use the sources website to find you


AlterLinks


© 2019. The information provided is copyright and may not be reproduced in any form or by any means (whether electronic, mechanical or photographic), or stored in an electronic retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher. The content may not be resold, republished, or redistributed. Indexing and search applications by Ulli Diemer and Chris DeFreitas.