scholarly journals Editor’s Note: CSK Awards Celebrate Fifty Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Sharon Verbeten

The world was a very different place in 1969 when the Coretta Scott King Award was instituted to honor African-American authors. Dr. Martin Luther King had recently been assassinated. And there was no organized group to advocate for We Need Diverse Books.But, thankfully, several librarians and a book publisher came together to establish the CSK Award, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2019.

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Claudette S. McLinn

ALSC joins ALA’s Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT), administrators of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards, in celebrating the award’s fiftieth anniversary. The award recognizes outstanding African American authors and artists of children’s books who demonstrate an appreciation of black culture and universal values.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-107
Author(s):  
Richard Francis Wilson

This article is a theological-ethical Lenten sermon that attempts to discern the transcendent themes in the narrative of Luke 9-19 with an especial focus upon “setting the face toward Jerusalem” and the subsequent weeping over Jerusalem. The sermon moves from a passage from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through a series of hermeneutical turns that rely upon insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Will Campbell, Augustine, and Paul Tillich with the hope of illuminating what setting of the face on Jerusalem might mean. Tillich’s “eternal now” theme elaborates Augustine’s insight that memory and time reduce the present as, to paraphrase the Saint, that all we have is a present: a present remembered, a present experienced, and a present anticipated. The Gospel is a timeless message applicable to every moment in time and history. The sermon seeks to connect with recent events in the United States and the world that focus upon challenges to the ideals of social justice and political tyranny.


Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-153
Author(s):  
Werner Sollors

The 1965/1966 Dcedalus issues on “The Negro American” reveal how America's racial future was imagined nearly a half-century ago, and at least one of the prophecies - voiced by sociologist Everett C. Hughes - found its fulfillment in an unexpected way at President Obama's inauguration in 2009. Short stories by Amina Gautier (“Been Meaning to Say” and “Pan is Dead”), Heidi Durrow's novel The Girl WhoFellfrom the Sky, plays by Thomas Bradshaw (Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed), and poems by Terrance Hayes (“For Brothers and the Dragon” and “The Avocado”) suggest trends in recent works by African American authors who began their publishing careers in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

The chapter reveals the violence associated with the Civil Rights Movement, the courage of African American activists (Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers) and the small minority of southern white ministers who joined them. In Montgomery, Alabama, Robert Graetz provided taxi service for demonstrators. Andrew Turnipseed paid the salary of James Love, who signed the Mobile bus petition, when his parishioners would not. No southern white minister would participate in freedom rides, but John Morris organized a Freedom Ride after the violence subsided. The group was arrested. Joseph Ellwanger was harassed in Birmingham. Hundreds of black protestors were arrested and tortured. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Edwin King was arrested and tortured. The Klan and other white supremacist groups flourished. Black activists and some whites were murdered in Mississippi. As Edwin King commented, “Good white people could do nothing in the face of madness.”


Author(s):  
Ryan M. Milner

Once in class—with the Photoshopped picture of Kanye West interrupting Martin Luther King, Jr. (figure 1.1) on the screen behind me—I asked my students to define internet meme. There was the usual desk staring and head scratching, until a student in the back spoke up. “It’s like … a nationwide inside joke,” she said. Her unconventional definition inspired chuckles. But as the hours wore on, I realized its poignancy. Like inside jokes between friends, internet memes—the multimodal texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants—balance the familiar and the foreign. And like inside jokes, internet memes are at once universal and particular; they allow creative play based on established phrasal, image, video, and performative tropes. The difference, of course, is the scale of these inside jokes. Assessing that scale, this book has charted the vibrancy that emerges when expressive strands become interactional threads, which in turn weave vast cultural tapestries. In the end, ...


Author(s):  
Lisa Woolfork

This essay explores the ways in which African American authors of that era reclaim the slave past as a site of memory for a nation eager to forget. Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) are the chapter’s main focus. These works resist the tide of historical amnesia and “lost cause” mythology that would minimize or relegate the enslaved to mere props in the larger Civil War drama of rupture and reconciliation. By centering the stories of the enslaved as ancestral foundations of post-civil rights black life, these authors promote a model for historical memory and genealogy that elevates black resilience.


Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla

This chapter highlights the national outpouring of grief and anger over the death of Heather Heyer. It discloses how Heyer's ashes were buried in a secret location in order to protect the grave from desecration by neo-Nazis. It also mentions the placement of Heather Heyer's name on a memorial wall at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama that honors martyrs of the civil rights movement. The chapter recalls Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights organization that staged demonstrations in Alabama and Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African American participant in the protest demonstrations, who was fatally shot by a white Alabama state trooper. It reviews the infamous “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965 that was stimulated by Jackson's shooting.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
MEGAN HUNT ◽  
BENJAMIN HOUSTON ◽  
BRIAN WARD ◽  
NICK MEGORAN

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.


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