Overview of some of the issues and cultural conflicts facing 21st century African Americans.

1. African Americans in the 21st
Century

2. HOW WE GOT HERE: POST-RECONSTRUCTION

3. A President Justifies the Klan

4. The Nadir

5. Slavery and Neo-Slavery

6. Convict labor in steel and coal
industries

7. The Great Migration:
hope for a better life

8. But across America, Blacks are
driven out…

9. …and kept out

10. Redlining in Chicago produces ghettos

11. Unequal Implementation of the
G.I. Bill of Rights and FHA Loans

12. Structural Challenges to Social
Mobility

13. Dearth of Black Businesses in
Black Neighborhoods

14. African Americans and Prison

15. Mass Incarceration: a new system of
disenfranchisement?

16. AFRICAN AMERICANS IN POP
CULTURE

17. “White Savior” stories

18. “Magic” Negros

19. Films Set in an All
Black Universe

20. The Remarkable Spike Lee

21. The Black TV
Family
Evolves

22. CONFLICTS AND CULTURAL
DISTINCTIONS

23. The Quest for
“Good” Hair

27. How many “black” Americas
are there?

28. My parents

29. My wedding

30. So, What Are YOU Anyway?

31. Thanks!!
Lesley Williams
thecrankylibrarian@yahoo.com
aalevanston.blogspot.com

32. My Blog

33. Selected Sources
Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, by Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharp
Some of My Best Friends are Black, by Tanner Colby
Disintegration, by Eugene Robinson
Sundown Towns, by James Loewen
Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabelle Wilkerson
The Century Cycle, by August Wilson
Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward
The Pact, by Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

34. Our Black Year, by Maggie Anderson
The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why, by Jabari Asim
“The Case for Reparations”, by Ta neshi Coates. Atlantic Magazine, June 2014
The Strange Career of Jim Crow by Vann C. Woodward
The Hidden Cost of Being African American, by Thomas M. Shapiro.
Who’s Afraid of Post Blackness? by Toure
The Covenant With Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West
Is Bill Cosby Right? : Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind? by Michael Eric
Dyson
The Spike Lee Reader, Edited by Paula J. Massood
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Tatum
When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Kaznelson