We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta Ta-Nehisi Coates

Notes from We Were Eight Years in Power

Introduction p. xiii

Regarding Good Negro Government p.xiii

In 1895 South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention:

“We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system.”

p.xiv Assessing Miller’s rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation…This was simply cover for the convention’s true aim – the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,” wrote Du Bois, “it was good Negro government.”

p.xv The central thread of this book is eight articles written during the eight years of the first black presidency – a period of Good Negro Government.

p. xvii Before each of these essays there is a kind of extended blog post, all eight of them (the articles ) were originally published in The Atlantic.

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

Search This Blog