NAACP 2017 Image Award Winner With his trademark acerbic wit, incisive humor, and infectious paranoia, one of our foremost comedians and most politically engaged civil rights activists looks back at 100 key events from the complicated history of black America. A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today’s popular black comics, including Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural force for more than fifty years. As an entertainer, he always kept it indisputably real about race issues in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with hard truths. As a leading activist against injustice, he marched at Selma during the Civil Rights movement, organized student rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and participated in hunger strikes in support of Black Lives Matter. In this collection of thoughtful, provocative essays, Gregory charts the complex and often obscured history of the African American experience. In his unapologetically candid voice, he moves from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the enjoyment of bacon and everything pig, the headline-making shootings of black men, and the Black Lives Matter movement. A captivating journey through time, Defining Moments in Black History explores historical movements such as The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as cultural touchstones such as Sidney Poitier winning the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit. An engaging look at black life that offers insightful commentary on the intricate history of the African American people, Defining Moments in Black History is an essential, no-holds-bar history lesson that will provoke, enlighten, and entertain.

The historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction has earned increasing attention from scholars. Only recently, however, have historians begun to explore African American efforts to interpret those events. With Defining Moments, Kathleen Clark shines new light on African American commemorative traditions in the South, where events such as Emancipation Day and Fourth of July ceremonies served as opportunities for African Americans to assert their own understandings of slavery, the Civil War, and Emancipation--efforts that were vital to the struggles to define, assert, and defend African American freedom and citizenship. Focusing on urban celebrations that drew crowds from surrounding rural areas, Clark finds that commemorations served as critical forums for African Americans to define themselves collectively. As they struggled to assert their freedom and citizenship, African Americans wrestled with issues such as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of respectability and progress, and gendered notions of citizenship. Clark's examination of the people and events that shaped complex struggles over public self-representation in African American communities brings new understanding of southern black political culture in the decades following Emancipation and provides a more complete picture of historical memory in the South.

From growing up in poverty to developing drugs that fight diabetes, seizures, and cancer, Dr. Frank L. Douglas has lived a life based on values, hard work, and self-control. Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream is a reflection on the events and people that made him into the man he is. In 1963, the year of the murder of Medgar Evers, Civil Rights marches, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, twenty-year-old Douglas arrived in the United States. A Fulbright scholar from British Guiana, Douglas studied engineering at Lehigh University, received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Cornell University, and did his Residency in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins. A curious and motivated young man from a colonial country struggling for independence, Douglas was shocked by the racism he received from white Americans and the cultural prejudice he received from black Americans. Struggling with his faith and identity, Douglas decided to control his own future through grit, hard work, and the road less travelled. Intimate and honest, incisive and searching, Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream is a memoir of self-determination and blazing your own path in a narrow-minded world. About the Author Dr. Frank L. Douglas grew up in British Guiana with his mother and four siblings. His love of education earned him a Fulbright Scholarship and he came to America during the turbulent years of the 1960s. He worked at Ciba Geigy and Aventis, and was involved in pharmaceutical research for drugs that treat tuberculosis, arthritis, diabetes, seizures, cancer, and pulmonary embolism, among others. Douglas has received the Global Pharmaceutical Research and Development Director of the Year Award in 2001 and 2004; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers in 2002; the Black History Maker Award in 2007; the Geoffrey Beene Foundation and GQ Magazine Rock Star of Science in 2010; and the Caribbean Heritage Award for Entrepreneurship in 2011 Douglas wrote Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream in honor of all who helped him on his journey.

After a long and painful transatlantic passage, African captives reached a continent they hadn't even known existed, where they were treated in ways that broke every law of civilization as they understood it. This was the discovery of America for a good number of our ancestors, one quite different from the "paradise" Columbus heralded but no less instrumental in shaping the country's history. What finding the New World meant to those who never sought it, and how they made the hostile, unfamiliar continent their own, is the subject of this volume, the first truly international collection of essays on African American literature and culture. Distinguished scholars, critics, and writers from around the world gather here to examine a great variety of moments that have defined the African American experience. What were the values, images, and vocabulary that accompanied African "explorers" on their terrifying Columbiad, and what new forms did they develop to re-invent America from a black perspective? How did an extremely heterogeneous group of African pioneers remake themselves as African Americans? The authors search out answers in such diverse areas as slavery, the transatlantic tradition, urbanization, rape and lynching, gender, Paris, periodicals, festive moments, a Berlin ethnologist, Afrocentrism, Mark Twain, Spain, Casablanca, orality, the 1960s, Black-Jewish relations, television images, comedy, and magic. William Wells Brown, Frank Webb, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Etheridge Knight, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Charles Johnson are among the many writers they discuss in detail. The result, a landmark text in African American studies, reveals, within a broader context than ever before, the great and often unpredictable variety of complex cultural forces that have been at work in black America.

A Prophetic Anointing for Today Defining Moments is a fascinating look at the remarkable ways in which God has used ordinary people to change history. But it is about more than history alone—it illuminates the present and unveils the future. Prophetic in nature, the book reveals how God wants to work in each of our lives to fulfill His purposes—today, tomorrow, and in the years to come. The stories in this collection of God-encounters carry a prophetic anointing for all who have ears to hear. Author Bill Johnson highlights the significant traits and contributions of many well-known revival leaders, including John Wesley, Charles Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Carrie Judd Montgomery, Smith Wigglesworth, John G. Lake, Evan Roberts, Rees Howells, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman, Randy Clark, and Heidi Baker. He explains the impact these leaders can have on us today as we respond to the life-changing truths revealed through their life stories. There is power in knowing the testimonies of men and women who experienced God in a defining moment and said yes to His unique call on their lives. It is a power that inspires us to hunger for God in such a way that we, too, will have an encounter with Him that launches us into the world of the “impossible,” enabling us to fulfill a greater measure of our destiny. Read this book with a sense of readiness, and watch what happens.

With 450 years of triumph against terrible odds and a rich heritage born of civilizations thousands of years old, here is African-American history as it is rarely seen: through the lens of its victories. In 365 thought-provoking daily entries, Glory Days takes the life and breadth of African-American history to entertain and enlighten, inform and inspire. For personal enjoyment and for reference, for parents and for educators, this is history that reaches out across a world of experience and ethnicity to inspire further inquiry, from the arrival of African explorer Estavanico in 1539 to the rise of Myrlie Evers as head of the NAACP in 1995; from the reign of the first Egyptian queen, Hatsepshut, in 1500 B.C. to the 1992 election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.

Marius Barnard is best known as a member of the pioneering medical team that performed the world’s first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1967, with his brother Chris. But his achievements extended into other spheres. He was an active anti-apartheid campaigner and MP for the Progressive Federal Party, he worked to improve cardiac surgery standards behind the Iron Curtain and globally, and he played a leading role in the creation of critical illness insurance - his invention, and one that has directly benefited the sick around the world. From humble beginnings as the son of missionary parents in the dusty Karoo town of Beaufort West to his position as one of the world’s leading cardiac surgeons, Marius Barnard’s story is a fascinating and remarkable chronicle of personal determination and courage. It is one of few first-hand accounts of the inaugural human heart transplant and its far-reaching repercussions, both in the world of medicine and in the private lives of its pioneers. In this sincere and deeply personal memoir, Barnard speaks frankly about his relationships with his brother, his colleagues and his adversaries, and describes with humility his fourteen-year struggle with cancer. With candour, authenticity and charm, Defining Moments presents the formidable challenges and spellbinding successes in the life of this international medical icon.