“When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.”
The Wretched of the Earth “Concerning Violence” (1961) (translation by Constance Farrington)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, philosophy/religion, professional development
“Brown Girl, Brownstones: (1959) A novel by Paule Marshall, The title refers to the rows of Victorian brownstone houses that abound in Fulton Park, Brooklyn, where Selina Boyce, the main character, lives. Selina is the daughter of Barbadian immigrants who moved to the U.S. twenty years earlier. After two decades of labor, mostly as domestics and factory workers, they, along with other Barbadians, have moved out of a cockroach-infested nieghborhood to better environs, with dreams of owning their own house. The Boyces attempt to acquire one of the brownstones and rise in the eyes of other middle-class Barbadians, However, Selina’s father, Deighton, has a vision of a perfect house he would consider living in, the kind of house in which whites would want to live. The money to acquire a house is obtained through inheritance, but because the house he wants is not available, Deighton decides to spend every bit of the money on a shopping spree on Fifth Avenue. The dream of the house is abandoned as the area is picked by inner-city developers for a major project.
Meanwhile, Selina has spiritually grown away from her family. She goes to college and copes with racism, temporarily transcending it through the medium of dance. However, the effect is short-lived: at a party following her stage performance, hosted by a rich white family on the Upper East Side, she begins to feel the pressure of racism again, through the unconsciously racist comments that are passed socially. But Selina emerges at the end of the novel as a much stronger person, having discovered herself through art.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Ralph Waldo Ellison: (1914-1993) American novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and critic. Ellison was recognized as one of the most influential and accomplished American authors of the twentieth century. He is best-known for his highly acclaimed first novel, Invisible Man, the story of a young African-American man’s painful efforts to find identity and recognition in a society that sees only his superficial racial characteristics. Recipient of the National Book Award for fiction, Invisible Man is regarded as a masterpiece for its complex treatment of racial repression and betrayal.
Ellison’s first collection of essays, Shadow and Act (1964), covers over two decades of reviews, criticism, and interviews concerning such subjects as literature, music, art, and race. Going to the Territory (1986) echoes many of these concerns. Ellison’s short stories, written in the 1940s and 1950s, are often anthologized. He taught and lectured widely in both America and Europe and was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University (1970-79). Ellison was at work on another novel, which had once already been destroyed by a fire at his home, at the time of his death.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
OK, for the final Friday of Black History Month 2026, here is a reading on the Underground Railroad along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Should you be interested, as I most certainly was when I first heard it two years ago, here is a National Public Radio story about the Underground Railroad, and in particular a man named Thomas Smallwood. As the interview subject, Scott Shane, observes, “Thomas Smallwood is an amazing guy who very few people know about.” Mr. Shane thought it sufficiently important that people know about Thomas Smallwood that he wrote a book on Mr. Smallwood, Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland.
When we think about the Underground Railroad, we tend, rightly, to think of Harriet Tubman. Thomas Smallwood is easily her equal in heroic feats of helping slaves escape bondage. He should be better known.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Alice (Malsenior) Walker: (b.1944) U.S. writer. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker moved to Mississippi after attending Spelman and Sarah Lawrence colleges and became involved with the civil-rights movement. Her works are noted for their insightful treatment of African-American culture. Her third and most popular novel, The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer Prize; film, 1985), depicts a black woman’s struggle for racial and sexual equality. Her later novels include The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). She has also written essays, some collected in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983); several books of poetry; short stories; and children’s books.
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
[Addendum: The Color Purple was filmed a second time, in 2023; this second film adaptation was based on the Broadway musical of The Color Purple.]
Sometime not long after I returned to New York in 2021, I attended a lecture a the New York Public Library (the main on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, with the lions Patience and Fortitude at the front) on Arturo Schomburg. When I lived in Harlem, I walked by his namesake, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, every morning on my way to work. I also regularly stopped in to view exhibits there as well.
Therefore, Arturo Schomburg has been something of a presence in my intellectual life since 2004.
There are two biographies of Arturo Schomburg: Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Schomburg, by Vanessa Valdes or Arturo Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Collector by Elinor Des Verney Sinette. I read the latter
One thing that I did pick up on at the lecture and in Ms Sinette’s book, however, was the existence of this article from the man himself. This is a PDF of an article “Arthur” (one thing I learned about Schomburg is that very little is known about him, including which given version of his given name he was using at any time) Schomburg wrote on Black History, “The Negro Digs Up His History.” Nota bene, please, that I have only posted the reading; next year at this time (I already have the basic structure assembled) you’ll find a fully realized lesson plan to accompany this article.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“C(yril) L(ionel) R(obert) James: (1901-1989) Trinidadian writer and political activist. As a young man he moved to Britain, where his first work, The Life of Captain Cipriani, was published in 1929. His study of Toussaint-Louverture, The Black Jacobins (1938) was a seminal work. During his first stay in the U.S. (1938-53), he became friends with Paul Robeson. Eventually deported to Britain because of his Marxism and labor activism, James wrote on cricket for the Guardian. His Beyond the Boundary (1963) mixes autobiography with commentary on politics and sports. He returned the to the U.S. in 1970 but eventually settled permanently in Britain.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“The Black child acquires two fundamental attitudes or beliefs as a result of his experiencing the British school system: a low self-image, and consequently low expectations in life. These are obtained through streaming, banding, bussing, ESN [Educationally Sub-Normal] schools, racist news media, and a white middle-class curriculum; by totally ignoring the Black child’s language, history, culture, identity. Through the choice of teaching materials, the society emphasizes who and what it thinks is important—and by implication, by omission, who and what it thinks is unimportant, infinitesimal, irrelevant. Through the belittling, ignoring, or denying of a person’s identity, one can destroy perhaps the most important aspect of a person’s personality—his sense of identity, of who he is. Without this, he will get nowhere.”
Excerpted from: Coard, Bernard. How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System: 50th Anniversary Expanded Fifth Edition. Kingston, Jamaica: McDermott Publishing, 2021.
“If you teach the Negro that he has accomplished as much good as any other race he will aspire to equality and justice without regard to race. Such an effort would upset the program of the oppressor in Africa and America. Play up before the Negro, then, his crimes and shortcomings. Let him learn and admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton. Lead the Negro to detest the man of African blood—to hate himself. The oppressor may then conquer, exploit, oppress and even annihilate the Negro by segregation without fear or trembling. With the truth hidden there will be little expression of thought to the contrary.
The American Negro has taken over an abundance of information which others have made accessible to the oppressed, but he has not yet learned to think and plan for himself as others do for themselves. Well might this race be referred to as the most docile and tractable people on earth. This merely means that when the oppressors once start the large majority of the race in the direction of serving the purposes of their traducers, the task becomes so easy in the years following that they have little trouble with the masses thus controlled. It is a most satisfactory system, and it has become so popular that European nations of foresight are sending some of their brightest minds to the United States to observe the Negro in ‘inaction’ in order to learn how to deal likewise with Negroes in their colonies. What the Negro in America has become satisfied with will be accepted as the measure or what should be allotted him elsewhere. Certain Europeans consider the ‘solution to the race problem in the United States’ one of our great achievements.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018.
OK–Black History Month 2026 has arrived. As I say every year, at Mark’s Text Terminal every month is Black History Month because Black History is American History. At the same time, far be it from me to second guess a person of Carter G. Woodson’s stature; Black History Month is his brainchild. This month I have a couple of new things to roll out, developed in the year since the last time the calendar spun around to February.
So let’s start out with these 27 pages of annotations I prepared to accompany all 17 chapters of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus. As you may know, Ms. Adichie is a member of a group of writers known as the “Children of Achebe” (about which I heard a great deal on a public radio program several years ago, and can now find no credible source for citation on the Internet). Artificial Intelligence (which I think dubious at best) yields a list of names that include Ms. Adichie, as well as Helon Habila, Chigozie Obioma, and Sefi Atta.
Achebe, of course, refers the the late, great, Chinua Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart is universally regarded as a masterpiece of post-colonial literature. Purple Hibiscus is also an exemplary post-colonial novel. And it’s difficult to get past the first sentence of this fine book without noticing Ms. Adichie’s homage to Chinua Achebe: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.”
Finally, in preparing this post, I intended to refer to material I’d prepared and published for Ms. Adichie’s short book (pamphlet, really, and literally the transcript of a TED talk), We Should All Be Feminists. To my surprise, I somehow never staged this material for inclusion in this blog. I have two versions of the unit, one complete and one incomplete. The complete unit was prepared for a small class of emergent readers and writers, so there is a lot of material. Needless to say, now that I have uncovered this lapse, I have this material in the warehouse and ready for publication.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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