Gerald Early

Now with a new foreword, this timely reissue features a remarkable collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent race relations and social change in the United States for a new generation of activists. One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder, was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first Black alderman. The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Beginning in 1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time, as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's interview subjects—sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white—are expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is today.

Covering everything from sports to art, religion, music, and entrepreneurship, this book documents the vast array of African American cultural expressions and discusses their impact on the culture of the United States.According to the latest census data, less than 13 percent of the U.S. population identify as African American; African Americans are still very much a minority group. Yet African American cultural expression and strong influences from African American culture are common across mainstream American culture—in music, the arts, and entertainment; in education and religion; in sports; and in politics and business. African American Culture: From Dashikis to Yoruba covers virtually every aspect of African American cultural expression, addressing subject matter that ranges from how African culture was preserved during slavery hundreds of years ago to the richness and complexity of African American culture in the post-Obama era.The most comprehensive reference work on African American culture to date, the book covers the expected topics, such as black contributions to literature and the arts, music and entertainment, religion, and professional sports, in great detail. It also provides coverage of less-commonly addressed subjects, such as African American fashion practices and beauty culture, the development of jazz music across different eras in the 20th century, black publishing, and examples of African American businesspeople who marketed their own cultural products as a way to achieving economic independence and creative autonomy.• Identifies influential aspects of African American culture through entries on topics such as African Americans in sports, in musical genres such as blues, gospel, hip hop, and jazz, and in religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Yoruba• Makes clear the numerous ways African Americans have produced, maintained, and evolved their culture in the United States• Enables readers to truly comprehend what "diversity" is by gaining substantive knowledge of how a particular group of persecuted people has learned to thrive artistically and culturally in the United States

From his status as Heavyweight Champion of the World to his ongoing battle with Parkinson's disease, Muhammad Ali is a celebrated icon known the world over for his athletic championships and his civic and humanitarian enterprises. Ali has been both underdog and champion, villain and prince, playboy and staunch Muslim, exalted hero and reviled conscientious objector- the very spirit of the 20th Century, (Norman Mailer). Organized by decade and illustrated with sixteen pages of classic photos, "The Muhammad Ali Reader" tells Ali's story in more than thirty essays from a stellar array of authors, athletes, and social commentators, including A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill, Gary Wills, Hunter Thompson, and Joyce Carol Oates. Floyd Patterson defends Ali's right to criticize the Vietnam War; Malcolm X explains how Ali went from entertainer to threat with his declaration as a man of race; Ali shares some intimate and definitive thoughts in a Playboy magazine interview; and Gay Talese gives us a front seat on a 1996 ride to Cuba where Ali meets up with Fidel Castro. Fascinating and diverse, this collective portrait reveals the many facets of the awe-inspiring, controversial, and beloved man and legend known to all as The Greatest: the one and only Muhammad Ali.

A picture of life in the boxing ring "Few novelists captured the contradictions of his country so simply or so honestly in the metaphor of the pure, fatalistic, and merciless community of bruising."—from the ForewordWhen The Bruiser was first published in 1936, almost every reviewer praised Jim Tully's gritty boxing novel for its authenticity—a hard-earned attribute. Twenty-eight years before the appearance of The Bruiser, Tully began a career in the ring, fighting regularly on the Ohio circuit. He knew what it felt like to step inside the ropes, hoping to beat another man senseless for the amusement of the crowd. Having won acclaim in the 1920s for such hard-boiled autobiographical novels as Beggars of Life and Circus Parade, Tully thus became both fighter and writer. "It's a pip of a story because it is written by a man who knows what he is writing about," said sportswriter and Guys and Dolls author Damon Runyon. "He has some descriptions of ring fighting in it that literally smell of whizzing leather. He has put bone and sinew into it, and atmosphere and feeling."The Bruiser is the story of Shane Rory, a drifter who turns to boxing and works his way up the heavyweight ranks. Like Tully, Shane starts out as a road kid who takes up prizefighting. While The Bruiser is not an autobiographical work, it does draw heavily on Tully's experiences of the road and ring. Rory is part Tully, but the boxers populating these briskly paced chapters are drawn from the many ring legends the writer counted among his friends: Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane, to name a few. The book is dedicated to Dempsey, the Roaring Twenties heavyweight champion, who said, "If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I'd still be the heavyweight champion of the world today."More than just a riveting picture of life in the ring, The Bruiser is a portrait of an America that Jim Tully knew from the bottom up.

Cultural critic Gerald Early has gathered here a collection of 13 writers who offer personal reflections on the public obsession with sport. They range from the pool hustler to the closet baseball fan; from late-night rodeo on cable TV to tennis games on the weathered fields of Illinois. But beyond fan or competitor or social commentator, these writers are storytellers, and it is in their personal stories - poignant, funny, extreme, illuminating - that we begin to identify the themes that galvanize both sport and literature: conflict and sacrifice, ritual and passion, humiliation and heroism.