Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Library Call Number: PS3619.T636.H45 2009.                                 

 

Excerpted from Kirkus Reviews:      “The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in…Stockett's ambitious first novel.  …recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter [Phelan] returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with…friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen…is careful what she shares…Encouraged by a New York editor, [Skeeter] decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous naiveté. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.”

Library Video of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help, starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard. Directed by Tat Taylor.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4H45 2011.

Kathryn Stockett’s book was on the bestseller list longer than any title since the Da Vinci Code, so it was only natural that it would become a movie.  In 1960s Mississippi, Skeeter, a southern society girl, returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her friends' lives, and a small Mississippi town, upside down when she decides to interview the black women who have spent their lives taking care of prominent southern families. Aibileen, Skeeter's best friend's housekeeper, is the first to open up, to the dismay of her friends in the tight-knit black community. The casting of Emma Stone and Bryce Dallas Howard as the southern white women and Tony-Award winning Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer in the two major roles of the maids, makes this movie worth seeing.  Spencer went on to win the Critic’s Choice Award, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA and Oscar for her role in the Help, one of only nine actors in history to win all in a single year.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 18, 2013.

Life upon these Shores: Looking at African American History 1513-2008 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Library Call Number: E185.G27 2011.

          A bold, beautifully illustrated book by the eminent historian uses countless portraits, drawings, pictures and documents to illustrate the long history of African American involvement in the American story, from the first group of “twenty and odd” Angolans captured in African Civil wars and sold into slavery, ending up in 1600’s Jamestown, Virginia; Jean Baptiste Point  DuSable’s founding of an early farm and trading post that would come to be known as Chicago; the paroxysm of violent struggle that wrenched America apart in the Civil War; W.E.B. DuBois’ magnificent photographic essay of blacks in America shown at the Paris Exposition of 1900; Jack Johnson’s extraordinary fights in and out of the ring; the Civil Rights era of the 60’s and 70’s to the recent first  inauguration of President Obama.  Most importantly, Gates notes the hundreds of black Americans who made significant contributions to all aspects of American life and culture.  This is a book of constant struggle, heartbreaking setbacks and triumphant victories. Most importantly, it is an integral part of American history.

Library Video of the Week, February 18, 2013.

Selma Lord Selma, starring McKenzie Astin , Jurnee Smollet-Bell, Ella Joyce and Clifton Powell. Directed by Charles Burnett.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.H5 S45 2003.

     From the Amazon Review:   …Based on Sheyann Webb's memoir, this movie effectively serves as a Mississippi Burning for kids. As 11-year-old Sheyann (Eve's Bayou's Jurnee Smollet) learns more about the degradation of her people, so, too, will a whole new generation. But the lesson is far from pleasant. With the exception of earnest seminary student Jonathan Daniels (Mackenzie Astin), a Yankee who's come down South to help register blacks to vote, the white people seem cartoonishly hateful. It's sobering to realize that this behavior really happened and was either sanctioned or ignored by the government. Being forced to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to vote and being gassed and beaten for marching are just some of the indignities Sheyann and her friends endure…  Inspiring, but a bit brutal…  --Kimberly Heinrichs

Library Video of the Week, February 11, 2013.



Black is…Black Ain’t, a documentary film produced and directed by Marlon T. Riggs. C2004. Library Call Number: E185.625.B5556 2004  (0The second film in recognition of Black History Month.)    

     When Barack Obama began his run for the Presidency in 2007, there was much talk in the African-American community on whether or not he was ”black enough.”  Everyone from Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson to the Fox news talking heads had their opinion of a half African, half white American being raised in Kansas and Hawaii by his white mother and grandparents.  But for many white Americans, the debate was mystifying.  What exactly did that mean?  This documentary attempts to explain.  As the film synopsis says:

“American culture has stereotyped black Americans for centuries. Equally devastating, the late Marlon Riggs argued, have been the definitions of ‘blackness’ African Americans impose upon one another which contain and reduce the black experience.  In this film, Riggs meets a cross-section of African Americans grappling with the paradox of numerous, often contradictory definitions of blackness. He shows many who have felt uncomfortable and even silenced within the race because their complexion, class, sexuality, gender or speech has rendered them ‘not black enough,’ or conversely, ‘too black.’”

     Awards:  Sundance Film Festival Filmmaker's Trophy, 1995.

Browsing Area Book of the Week February 11, 2013.

The Last Holiday: A Memoir by Gil Scott-Heron.  Library Call Number: PS3569.C7Z46 2012.

     Premier poet and songwriter  and so-called “godfather of rap” Gil Scott-Heron looks back on his life and opens up an illuminating career that ran for decades on the cutting edge of social commentary.  Written in the last few months before his death, the creator of 20 albums and many singles recalls his childhood, his first piano, hauled into his grandmothers Tennessee house by a junk man, his never-to-be-forgotten song, “The Revolution will not be televised,” and insights into many of the most wrenching experiences of the civil rights era.  With a poet’s eye and cadence, he describes decades of the fight for equal rights around the world. 

     As reviewer Ben Ratliff noted in the New York Times Review: “Scott-Heron himself, along with two black classmates, desegregated a Jackson[TN]  junior high school, and he writes lucidly about that experience and its aftermath -- including his mother's decision not to push him into it, and the strangeness of studying the Civil War in a white Southern school: ''It was like reviewing it from the loser's locker room.''

Library Video of the Week, February 4, 2013.

 

Murder in Mississippi, starring Tom Hulce, Jennifer Grey, Blair Underwood, CCH Pounder. Directed by Roger Young.  1990.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9M835M87 2008.

        In 1964, three civil rights workers who were registering people to vote in the county of Neosho Mississippi, were arrested and thrown into jail in Philadelphia Mississippi, then released in the early hours of the morning.  Shortly thereafter, they were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and their bodies buried in a levee.  There have been at least three movies made of the incident, but this one may be the most compelling, with its emphasis on the trio’s last days of working for the rights of southern African-Americans.  The dark days of the struggle for equal rights have been artfully scripted by Ben Stein and well-acted by all the primary players in this movie.  The film gives the audience a real sense of the tension and danger hovering over the northern volunteers who dared to follow their conscience and come south.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 4, 2013.

Devil in the Grove: the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King.  Library Call Number: KF224.G76K56 2012.

From the liner notes: In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

Library Video of the Week, February 27, 2012.

When I Rise, an Alpheus Media Production.  Directed by Mat Hames; Executive Producer, Don Carleton. Library Call Number: E185.93.T4W44 2011.

          This riveting documentary chronicles the extraordinary life of Barbara Smith Conrad, a world renowned operatic mezzo-soprano.  In 1957, at the University of Texas-Austin, she was chosen to play the female lead in the opera Dido and Aeneas, opposite a white male singer.  That decision caused turmoil throughout the state of Texas and culminated in the state Legislature passing a bill which barred her from performing.  The young girl from East Texas was subjected to hatred and bigotry out of all proportion, yet continued on at the University, despite the humiliation heaped on her, and went on to become a premier performer in international opera.  Revisiting that moment in the present day, Smith Conrad’s grace, poise and capacity for forgiveness reveal more than words can tell about the venality and petty hatreds of that sad era in American history.  The film, selected for screening at numerous film festivals, won several awards for its inspirational story.
This video is shelved on the fith floor of the library.

Browsing Area Boook of the Week, February 27, 2012.

When the Thrill is Gone by Walter Mosley.

Library Call Number: PS3563.O88456W45 2011
          From Publisher’s Weekly: Mosley fills his third thriller featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after Known to Evil) with insights even deeper than the mysteries McGill is trying to solve. Chrystal Tyler, a potential new client, tells McGill that she's afraid her billionaire husband is having an affair and may kill her. While McGill realizes the woman is lying, he needs the case and agrees to see what he can do to make her husband back off. Meanwhile, McGill's wife of 24 years, Katrina, is having an affair; his favorite son, Twill, has a new scam working; and longtime boxing mentor Gordo Tallman is living in his apartment, fighting cancer. Then Harris Vartan, a dangerous organized crime figure, asks a favor that will lead McGill on a journey of self-discovery.
          Readers will encounter the full panoply of complex Mosley characters, from deceitful women to ruthless killers, but it's the often surprising bonds of love and family that lift this raw, unsentimental novel.

Library Video of the Week, February 20, 2012.

Intruder in the Dust, staring Juano Hernandez, Claude Jarmin, Jr.  and David Brian. Directed by Clarence Brown. 1949. Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4I67 2011.

       From the IMDB database:  “Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired. Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him, but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence. “

          Nominated for two Golden Globes, a Writer’s Guild Award and and winning a UN award, the film, based on a William Faulkner novel, is a hidden masterpiece. Both noirish and progressive for its time, Intruder in the Dust provides an interesting look at white attitudes toward equal rights in the early post-war era.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 13, 2012.

Juice! by Ishmael Reed. Library Call Number: PS3568.E365J85 2011.

Reed has written a biting, satiric look at what passes for race relations in the American “post-racial” society.  O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1994 acts as a catalyst to the story here of five aging friends, all in a different art, all worried about the numerous illnesses and injuries of aging, watching America progress through the 90’s into the 21^st century.  Told through the eyes of African-American Paul Blessings, a diabetic television cartoonist for an alternative station, “Juice!” is an obsessive account of Simpson’s trial, the rise of the corporation and the burial of culture.  Blessings, who pens a cartoon called Attitude the Badger, says, “Jonathan Kraal, who had taken over this…network kept me on.  He wanted his station to appeal to high school teachers, dot commers and MBAs.  I have nothing in common with these people.” 

          Dalkey Archive says, “Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of ‘post-race’ America.”

Library Video of the Week, February 13, 2012.

Nat Turner: A troublesome property.  Producers, Frank Christopher, Kenneth S. Greenberg; Director, Charles Burnett; writers, Charles Burnett, Frank Christopher and Kenneth S. Greenberg.  Library Call Number: E444.T87N38 2002.

        Nat Turner was a Virginia slave, who led a fight for freedom in 1831 that became known as the Southampton Insurrection. Learning to read at a young age, Turner was convinced God had chosen him to kill the white people around him and free their slaves.  A solar eclipse seemed to be a Divine omen to Turner; he enjoined four of his trusted friends to come with him and when another atmospheric disturbance occurred shortly thereafter, he began a rampage that spread from the plantation of his master into the countryside; he led between 100 and 200 slaves on a march through Virginia, killing over 60 whites in a county where slaves far outnumbered their owners.  Hoping to free enough slaves to establish a foothold in the countryside, Turner’s force was finally overwhelmed by white militias, though he himself hid from them for months afterward. In the reprisals, hundreds of slaves--men women and children--were killed and the Virginia Legislature later made it illegal to teach slaves to read and write.  This was one of the beginning conflicts that would culminate in the American Civil War thirty years later.  Look for this Video in the 5th floor History Collection.

Library Video of the Week, February 6, 2012.

Boycott, starring Jeffrey Wright, Terrence Howard, and Carmen Ejogo . Directed by Clark Johnson. 2001.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4 B69 2001

          What became one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights Era is recreated here, with Jeffrey Wright superbly playing an obscure Baptist minister in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, who takes up the cause of equal rights. When a small, middle-aged black woman named Rosa Parks (played by Iris Little-Thomas ) is directed by the bus driver to give her seat to a white man and refuses, she is arrested.  The minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, is named to head what becomes known as the Montgomery Bus boycott.  African-Americans, who at that time were ¾ of the passengers, refused to board city buses leading to a financial meltdown of the city’s transit system.  In response, White Citizen’s Councils firebombed black churches and the houses of King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy.

          Boycott  faithfully recreates these events, which began in Montgomery and became a national cause. Wright is stellar as the charismatic King, capturing his tones and the power of his voice, while demonstrating his fear and vulnerability.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 6, 2012.

Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890’s to the present by Deborah Willis. Library Call Number: TR680.W53 2009.

            From the jacket: As a student in the 1970s, Deborah Willis came to the realization that images of black beauty, female and male, simply did not exist in the larger culture. Determined to redress this imbalance, Willis examined everything from vintage ladies' journals to black newspapers, and started what would become a lifelong quest. With more than two hundred arresting images, many previously unpublished, Posing Beauty recovers a world many never knew existed. Historical subjects such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker illuminate the past; Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali take us to the civil rights era; Denzel Washington, Lil' Kim, and Michelle Obama celebrate the present. Featuring the works of more than one hundred photographers, including Carl van Vechten, Eve Arnold, Lee Friedlander, and Carrie Mae Weems, Willis's book not only celebrates the lives of the famous but also captures the barber shop, the bodybuilding contest, and prom night. Posing Beauty challenges our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to be “beautiful.”

Library Videos of the Week, February 28, 2011.

The Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry, a Reel Deal Productions film for American Experience; produced and directed by Jacqueline Shearer; narrated by Morgan Freeman. Story by Jacqueline Shearer.
Library Call Number: E540.N3 M37 2006.
     The American Experience presents the true story of one of the first African-American regiments fighting in the Civil War. Formed in Boston, Massachusetts, under the direction of white officers, the 54th earned fame in the futile attack on Fort Wagner, one of the Confederate army’s strongholds along the South Carolina coast. Through early photos, painting, dramatic readings from diaries and newspaper accounts, the film documents the true, heroic and tragic story of the 54th’s part in the fight for Union.  Look for this video in the 5th floor collection.

Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher and Denzel Washington, directed by Edward Zwick.
Library Call Number: E656 .G66 2000.
      The drama based on the 54th stars Broderick as Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a son of prominent abolitionists, who volunteers to lead one of the Union’s 1sr black regiments, though he is told the enemy have orders to kill white officers of black troops on sight. Taking a raw group of runaway slaves and freedmen, Shaw and his Sergeant train the 54th into a fighting unit fighting the bigotry of the enemy and his own army. Superb performances by Broderick and Andre Braugher as his lifetime friend, Thomas, are overshadowed by the rock-solid Morgan Freeman as the Sergeant Major of the unit and Oscar-winning Denzel Washington as an escaped slave turned Union soldier.                                                                Look for this video soon in the 4th floor Browsing collection.

Browsing Area book of the Week, February 21, 2011.

The Making of African America: the four great migrations by Ira Berlin.

Library Call Number: E185.B473 2010.
          Beginning with the Middle Passage, when Africans were forcibly taken from their homeland, Berlin traces the movement and migrations of Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. After slave ships arrived, slaves were transported across the South in huge numbers to work on plantations in the second migration. During the first half of the 20th century there was a similar movement, though voluntary, as millions of sharecroppers and poor farmers, traveled North, all but abandoning some small towns, seeking industrial jobs in the car factories of Michigan and the slaughterhouses of Illinois and Kansas. They found work making tires and glass in Ohio, boilers, submarines and cookware in Wisconsin, steel in Pennsylvania, warships in New York and New Jersey. Finally, a new influx of immigrants appeared from Africa, South America and the Caribbean. All four movements have had a profound effect on Black history and culture, as well as on America itself.

Library Video of the Week, February 21, 2011

Daughters of the Dust, starring Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones and Cora Lee Day. Directed by Julie Dash. Library Call Number: PN1995.9.N4D29 1999.

          An independent film recently named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, Daughters of the Dust traces the history of the Gullah people, former slaves who lived an isolated existence on the barrier islands of Georgia. With a distinct dialect and cultural heritage stretching back to Africa, the story tells the tale of onf family's migration north in 1902, searching for a better life, the problems of assimilation and the proud heritage they refuse to leave behind.
          When the film was released in 1999, Siskel and Ebert gave it “Two Thumbs Up! A haunting film rich in visual beauty. A mystical examination of what it means to honor and cherish family."

Library Video of the Week, February 14, 2011.

For Love of Liberty: the story of America’s Black Patriots, directed by Frank Martin. Written by Frank Martin and Jeff Stetson. Hosted by Halle Berry, with contributions by Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman and others.

Library Call Number: E185.63 .F67 2009.
          The numbers are impressive: 5,000 African-Americans fought for the American Rebellion, more than 200,000 fought in the Civil War, 380,000 fought and died in World War I France and more than 2 million took up arms in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Yet their story remains underrepresented. This television documentary, through letters, diaries and military reports of action, chronicle the contribution of African American men and women at arms throughout the nation’s history, from its beginning struggle with Great Britain through the current war in Afghanistan.

Library Video of the Week, February 7, 2011.

Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, starring Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz. Directed by Lee Daniels.  2009.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.C39 P74 2010.
              There are two basic kinds of movies: escapist action or comedy the viewer might or might not take seriously; and difficult movies that may or may not have the ending you’d like to see. Precious is mostly the second type. Emotionally wrenching—and that’s an understatement--the movie follows the life of teenager Clarisse Precious Jones, (played by Sidibe in her first role) as she moves through 1987 Harlem. Barely literate, obese, pregnant and with one Downs child already, living with a mother who’s abusive enough she should be in jail, the young girl’s life is a living hell. And yet, she will not give up. She clings to dreams and hope, enrolls in an alternative school, finds help from a caring teacher and social worker and eventually has a confrontation with her mother that scorches the screen. The down in this movie is so low that not everyone will be able to cope with it, but the uplifting moments correspondingly soar, the performances have been described as “fearless,” and the message, though mostly grim, holds out the hope that keeps people going. Numerous awards including two Oscars and a Golden Globe for this one.