Looking Forward to 2018!

We are reading They Can’t Kill Us All for discussion on Jan. 6, 2018.

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is our book to read for Black History Month! It’s a bestseller and getting a lot of praise.

Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, is the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. It’s 304 pages long. We should read this!

Toni Morrison’s book, The Origin of Others is very short. Combining it with one of her novels seems like a good idea.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has been chosen for the Big Read of 2018. It ‘s a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Because it’s short (and it’s a poetry book) I was thinking we’d read it with another book of verse: Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down.

The Floating World is a novel about Hurricane Katrina and Jane Crow is a biography of Pauli Murray. It may be too

long (512 pages!)

The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard sounds like a fun adventure.

Comments

The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride by David J. Dennis Jr. in collaboration with David J. Dennis Sr.

Book Discussion of The Movement Made Us by David Dennis Jr. and David Dennis Sr. Discussion date: December 30, 2023 Nine of us met for our last book discussion of 2023 on the last Saturday of December. The book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and The Legacy of a Freedom Ride. This book chronicles Dave Dennis Sr. ’s Movement stories from 1961 to 1964. The stories are transcribed by his son Dave Dennis Jr. Meghan : He (the son) was like translating a n oral history that he had broken down through interviews . I like the wordplay he used but I also questioned how much of this is the son kind of creating literature and not necessarily the father’s voice? But at the same time, I appreciated it because it’s so inter-generational because the Movement is about family and passing down activism. Janice: T he re is a YouTube video about this book recorded at MDAH. (Mississippi Department of Archives and History . ) The video features both David Dennis Sr. And

New People by Danzy Senna

The Urban Life Expe rience Book Discussion Series continued on June 3 rd , with a discussion of New People by Danzy Senna. This 2017 novel features a young woman, Maria, who is engaged to Khalil, but becomes increasingly obsessed by a poet i n their community who is unambiguously Black. Maria and Khalil are both mixed-raced people and are being featured in a doc umentary about multi-raced Black people who are exceptionally light complexioned and consider themselves upwardly mobile. Maria was adopted by a Black woman named Gloria who didn’t realize that her baby was never going to appear Black. Maria is writing her dissertation on the musicality of the Jim Jones cult and Khalil is starting a dot-com company with his best friend Ethan. The book discussion was quite contentious and brought up questions on who has the authority to write this kind of book. Janice: I’d go so far as to say I liked it. The

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby, 2003

Nine of us met on Saturday March 16 th to discuss Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby, published in 2003. Although born 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, Ella Baker was predominantly reared in Littleton, North Carolina. Her Civil Rights and Human Rights career spanned over five decades, some of her work took place in New York and some took place in the South. Some of the groups she worked with are YNC L Young Negroes’ Cooperative League WEP Worker s’ Education Project NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference M FDP Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party SCEF Southern Christian Education Fund SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee She established her place in these movements as a behind the scenes organizer and never sought leadership positions. Her philosophy about movement work involved training regular people to lead from the bottom up, as opposed to

Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

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