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A Ligature for Black Bodies attempts to re-humanize black bodies into black people by holding the power structures and people accountable who have reified a dominant and destructive discourse. The collection explores the meanings of seeing police officers killing black and brown people through their dash cams and body cams as they shoot them and everyday citizens standing witness and documentarian through their cellphones. A Ligature for Black Bodies highlights how these videos mirror pictures that lynching attendees took and/or sent as postcards across the country in the early to mid twentieth century. Our view of dying and dead bodies today, of African Americans made lifeless while surrounded by spectators, drives the manuscript. The found poems and persona poems read as police, prosecutor, and journalist's 'confessions' to the deaths of the Black people recorded on today's visual media. A Ligature for Black Bodies roots these confessions in the truths of contemporary news articles, autopsy reports, court testimonies, verdicts, and sentences to illustrate how a white power structure seeks to make bodies out of black people. This conversation reveals a racially rooted power structure that creates and perpetuates racism and how black people have, much too often, had to reclaim these bodies systematically stripped of breath. The poems are evidence of Black people's continued American striving to convince that same power structure that black lives matter. The final poem, written in the voice of Sandra Bland and written to LaQuan McDonald and Tamir Rice, seeks to do just that. The poems refuse the narrative of black people as bodies only. Instead, their discourse creates a space where the poems re-member black people's dismemberment at the hands of white people through a journey of truth-telling.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A dynamic, moving hybrid work that celebrates Black youth, often too fleeting, and examines Black lives lost to police violence.
"In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award-winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays--Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othello--to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century? Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like "fair," "suspect," and "juvenile." He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeare's Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke. At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life." -- Provided by publisher.

• Prologue: A half century of torture
• Introduction
• The black box
• The B-team
• Charging genocide
• Bad guys
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: A model for justice

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens--and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay--Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us--and lending a voice to those long deceased.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: a half century of torture
• Introduction
• The black box
• The B-team
• Charging genocide
• Bad guys
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: a model for justice

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens--and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay--Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us--and lending a voice to those long deceased.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

On Christmas night 1951, Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette retired to bed in their white frame house tucked inside a small orange grove in Mims, Florida. Ten minutes later, a bomb shattered their house, their lives, and any notions that the South's post-war transition to racial equality would be a smooth one. Harry Moore died that night, his wife nine days later.

A story of resistance, power and politics as revealed through New York City's complex history of police brutality The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was the catalyst for a national conversation about race, policing, and injustice. The subsequent killings of other black (often unarmed) citizens led to a surge of media coverage which in turn led to protests and clashes between the police and local residents that were reminiscent of the unrest of the 1960s. Fight the Power examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community's long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city's courtrooms. Taylor challenges the belief that police reform is born out of improved relations between communities and the authorities arguing that the only real solution is radically reducing the police domination of New York's black citizens.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments
• A note on the use of the Federal Census
• "Light is bursting upon the world!"
• "Negroes are the favorites of the government"
• "Kansas has an ample supply of darkies"
• "A day more dreadful than any that we have yet experienced"
• "Some finely tuned spring-release trap"
• "The life of no colored man is safe"
• "Sowing the seed of hatred and prejudice"
• "Peace at home is the most essential thing"
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1. Incidents of racist violence in Kansas, 1861-1927
• Appendix 2. Incidents of jailhouse defenses and police resistance against racist violence in Kansas, 1890-1916
• Notes
• Selected bibliography
• Index.

Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post "Civil War Kansas." Campney's capacious definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence--property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns--used to intimidate African Americans. As he shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet Campney's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, This Is Not Dixie rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments Introduction
• 1 "The Special Object of Hatred and Persecution": The Terror of Emancipation 2 "A Long Series of Oppression, Injustice, and Violence": The Purgatory of Sectional Reconciliation 3 "Lynched, Burned Alive, Jim-Crowed . . . in My Country": Shaping Responses to the Descent to Hell 4 "If You Can, the Colored Needs Help": Reaching Out from Local Communities 5 "It Is Not for Us to Run Away from Violence": Fueling the NAACP's Antilynching Crusade Epilogue: Closer to the Promised Land Notes Works Cited Index About the Author.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. In this evocative and deeply moving history, Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. The People's Voice and Police Brutality
• 2. The Communist Party and Police Brutality
• 3. The Nation of Islam and Police Brutality
• 4. Civil Rights, Community Activists, and Police Brutality
• 5. Police Brutality, the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant Riots, and the National Civil Rights Movement
• 6. John Lindsay, Racial Politics, and the Civilian Complaint Review Board
• 7. The Triumph of a False Narrative
• 8. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Brutality
• 9. Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and the Resistance to Giuliani
• 10. The Campaign to End Stop, Question, and Frisk
• 11. The Limits of Mayor de Blasio's Police Reform Agenda; Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here?

A story of resistance, power and politics as revealed through New York City's complex history of police brutality The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was the catalyst for a national conversation about race, policing, and injustice. The subsequent killings of other black (often unarmed) citizens led to a surge of media coverage which in turn led to protests and clashes between the police and local residents that were reminiscent of the unrest of the 1960s. Fight the Power examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community's long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city's courtrooms. Taylor challenges the belief that police reform is born out of improved relations between communities and the authorities arguing that the only real solution is radically reducing the police domination of New York's black citizens.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: a half century of torture
• Introduction
• The black box
• The B-team
• Charging genocide
• Bad guys
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: a model for justice

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens--and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay--Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us--and lending a voice to those long deceased.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface and Acknowledgments.
• Chapter 1 The Police and Vigilante Killings of African Americans in the Twenty-First Century.
• Chapter 2 Making Sense of the Killings: Theoretical Insights, Conceptual Framework, and My Racial Control Argument.
• Chapter 3 Violence-Centered Racial Control Systems and Mechanisms in U.S. History.
• Chapter 4 Police and Vigilante Killings of African Americans as a Racial Control Mechanism.
• Chapter 5 Viewing the Killings Through an Economic Lens: Hypercapitalism and the Growth of the American Police State.
• Chapter 6 Ground Zero: The Vicious Cycle of Fatal Dominative Encounters.
• Chapter 7 Making Black Lives Matter: Lessons Learned and Unfinished Business.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Killing African Americans examines the pervasive, disproportionate, and persistent police and vigilante killings of African Americans in the United States as a racial control mechanism that sustains the racial control system of systemic racism. Noel A. Cazenave's well-researched and conceptualized historical sociological study is one of the first books to focus exclusively on those killings and to treat them as political violence. Few issues have received as much conventional and social media attention in the United States over the past few years or have, for decades now, sparked so many protests and so often strained race relations to a near breaking point. Because of both its timely and its enduring relevance, Killing African Americans can reach a large audience composed not only of students and scholars, but also of Movement for Black Lives activists, politicians, public policy analysts, concerned police officers and other criminal justice professionals, and anyone else eager to better understand this American nightmare and its solutions from a progressive and informed African American perspective.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Poems that imagine a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death. Shayla Lawz's debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean-in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media-to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real-a refracted past and present-through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities. speculation, n. won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A timely and urgent exploration into the ways artists have grappled with race and grief in modern America, conceived by the great curator Okwui Enwezor Featuring works by more than 30 artists and writings by leading scholars and art historians, this book - and its accompanying exhibition, both conceived by the late, legendary curator Okwui Enwezor - gives voice to artists addressing concepts of mourning, commemoration, and loss and considers their engagement with the social movements, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, that black grief has galvanized. Artists included: Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kevin Beasley, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Garrett Bradley, Melvin Edwards, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Charles Gaines, Theaster Gates, Ellen Gallagher, Arthur Jafa, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adam Pendleton, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Cameron Rowland, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Diamond Stingily, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jack Whitten. Essays by Elizabeth Alexander, Naomi Beckwith, Judith Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Massimiliano Gioni, Saidiya Hartman, Juliet Hooker, Glenn Ligon, Mark Nash, Claudia Rankine, and Christina Sharpe.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: Racism's ugly past; white Texas's twentieth century actions / Bruce A. Glasrud
• Paris is burning: lynching and racial violence in Lamar County, 1890-1920 / Brandon Jett
• An "exciting occurrence": the lynching / Patricia Bernstein
• The Houston riot of 1917 / Calvin Smith
• Violence in a heathen land: the Longview race riot of 1919 / William M. Tuttle Jr .
• A "good job" in the early hours of the morning / Monte Akers
• The Sherman courthouse riot of 1930 / Edward Hake Phillips
• Violence in an "arsenal of democracy": the Beaumont race riot, 1943 / James A. Burran
• Houston and the TSU riot / Bernard Friedberg
• Loyal Garner arrest / Howard Swindle
• The Jasper lynching / Joyce E. King
• Bust town / Nate Blakeslee
• The beating of Billy Ray Johnson / Pamela Colloff
• Afterword: Twenty-first century Texas race relations / Bruce A. Glasrud.

Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas provides an arresting look at the history of violence against African Americans in Texas. From a lynching in Paris at the turn of the century to the 1998 murder of Jasper resident James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death behind a truck, this volume uncovers the violent side of race relations in the Lone Star State. Historian Bruce A. Glasrud has curated an essential contribution to Texas history and historiography that will also bring attention to a chapter in the state's history that, for many, is still very much a part of the present.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"ALWAYS IN SEASON explores the lingering impact of more than a century of lynching African Americans and connects this form of historic racial terrorism to racial violence today. The film centers on the case of Lennon Lacy, an African American teen who was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, North Carolina, on August 29, 2014. Despite inconsistencies in the case, local officials quickly ruled Lennon's death a suicide, but his mother, Claudia, believes Lennon was lynched. Determined to find answers about what happened to her son, Claudia moves from paralyzing grief to leading the fight for justice. As the film unfolds, Lennon's case, and the suspicions surrounding it, intersect with stories of other communities seeking justice and reconciliation. A few hundred miles away in Monroe, Georgia, a diverse group of reenactors, including the adult daughter of a former Ku Klux Klan leader, annually dramatize a 1946 quadruple lynching to ensure the victims are never forgotten and encourage the community to come forward with information that might bring the perpetrators to justice. As the terrorism of the past bleeds into the present, the film asks: what will it take for Americans to begin building a national movement for racial justice and reconciliation?"

• The politics of mourning in America: from the Greensboro massacrew to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• To join hate: Antigone and the agonistic politics of mourning
• The imaginary city: consensual mourning from Pericles to John Rawls
• "There is trouble here. There is more to come": Greek tragedy and the work of mourning
• A splintering and shattering activity: truth, reconciliation, mourning
• Afterword: Black Lives Matter and the democratic work of mourning.

Recent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but David W. McIvor believes that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourning-its relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities.In Mourning in America, McIvor addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. McIvor offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Greek tragedy, and scholarly discourses on truth and reconciliation. Mourning in America connects these literatures to ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice, and it contextualizes Black Lives Matter in the broader politics of grief and recognition. McIvor also examines recent, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes such as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004-2006), which provided a public examination of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979-a deadly incident involving local members of the Communist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The aftermath of a police killing of a black man, told through the eyes of the bystander who filmed the act, an African-American police officer and a high-school baseball phenom inspired to take a stand.