The author of "Every Good-Bye Ain't Gone" presents a provocative, timely examination of racial identity. Itabari Njeri lays out with precision and power how limited racial definitions contribute to the psychological slavery that makes the mind "the last plantation".

The Last Plantation By: Betty Lane Maddox Betty Lane Maddox was born to Melvin and Robert Duncan Walls in Hollandale, Mississippi. Both of her parents are now deceased. She is the second of twelve children: Rose Smith, Melvin Walls Jr. (deceased), Maxine Walls, Linda Park, Joyce Walls, Rosie Adams, Raymond Walls, Lester Walls, Billy Walls, Sheila Turnipseed, and Lisa Wells. Time was hard when Maddox was young. She grew up on many plantation chopping and picking cotton for the white plantation owners. You never got ahead. At the end of the year, her father had no money coming in because it was all spent on food, a pair of shoes for school from the boss man’s store, and for the shack they lived in. It was years before Maddox even knew what money was and looked like. Maddox has gone through so much in her life. She has been married to a beautiful man for twenty-five years. She is saved by God’s grace and a member of The Christian Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church of Rev. Tyran T. Laws in Chicago, Illinois. Maddox made history when she worked the 2012 re-election campaign of President Obama. She helped make the re-election of the first black president happen. Maddox has come a long way from a sharecropper’s daughter.

"In the Last Plantation, James Jones uses the plantation metaphor to investigate how Congress operates as a racialized governing institution, a state body organized through racism that imposes the rules that structure our society along racial lines. He develops his argument in two parts by analyzing the career experiences of Black congressional workers. First, he shows how the congressional workplace produces inequality. Lawmakers' decisions to exempt themselves from the regulations that they impose on other employers have led to insular work processes that perpetuate racial inequality. They have created and managed an unequal workplace where positions are racially stratified, space is segregated, and identities and interactions are racialized. This hierarchy constrains the agency of non-White workers and leads to the credentialing of a White power elite. Second, he demonstrates how Black workers from legislative staffers to cafeteria servers have fought back against these unequal work processes and injustices on Capitol Hill. He shows how Black workers have reimagined Congress as a black capitol, a site of minority empowerment where they have used their institutional positions to promote racial justice. Examining these processes, The Last Plantation argues that Congress and its workplace operate both as sites of oppression and, through the labor of Black workers, as sites of resistance. By exploring the Last Plantation from "above" and "below," Jones shows both how racism is maintained by this governing institution and how racism is confronted. Through this argument, he develops a theory of legislative inequality to show how the unequal distribution of resources and rewards among workers influences the creation of public policy and the organization of the American political system. He draws on interviews with 75 congressional staffers, archival research, ethnographic observations, and statistical analysis of personnel records"--

Unfolding within a framework of two tumultuous weeks, this novel tells of the struggle for autonomy of both a young woman and a repressed country. Interweaving the young woman's gradual growth to consciousness with the death of the British plantation system, this story portrays the demise of an economic and political system paralleling the development of an individual. While presenting Caribbean politics in an understandable way, this tale also includes insight into Afro-Indian relations, traditional healing practices, and family relationships.

Provides information about what daily life was like on a southern plantation, including how slaves worked and dressed and what they ate.

Mac Griswold's The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister—and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a Colonial New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago. In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly knew that boxwoods that large—twelve feet tall, fifteen feet wide—had to be hundreds of years old. So, as it happened, was the house: Sylvester Manor had been held in the same family for eleven generations. Formerly encompassing all of Shelter Island, New York, a pearl of 8,000 acres caught between the North and South Forks of Long Island, the manor had dwindled to 243 acres. Still, its hidden vault proved to be full of revelations and treasures, including the 1666 charter for the land, and correspondence from Thomas Jefferson. Most notable was the short and steep flight of steps the family had called the "slave staircase," which would provide clues to the extensive but little-known story of Northern slavery. Alongside a team of archaeologists, Griswold began a dig that would uncover a landscape bursting with stories. Based on years of archival and field research, as well as voyages to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe, The Manor is at once an investigation into forgotten lives and a sweeping drama that captures our history in all its richness and suffering. It is a monumental achievement.