Mixed Race Studies

She Loved Baseball: The Effa Manley Story

Balzer + Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins)
2010-10-19
32 pages
8.5 in (w) x 11 in (h) x 0.25 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061349201
eBook ISBN: 9780062184801

Audrey Vernick

Illustrated by Don Tate

Effa always loved baseball. As a young woman, she would go to Yankee Stadium just to see Babe Ruth’s mighty swing. But she never dreamed she would someday own a baseball team. Or be the first—and only—woman ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

From her childhood in Philadelphia to her groundbreaking role as business manager and owner of the Newark Eagles, Effa Manley always fought for what was right. And she always swung for the fences.

From author Audrey Vernick and illustrator Don Tate comes the remarkable story of an all-star of a woman.

Preview of DREAM OF THE WATER CHILDREN by Wendy Cheng

2Leaf Press: A Small Press with Big Ideas!
New York, New York
2016-01-18

Wendy Cheng, Assistant Professor
School of Social Transformation Faculty
Arizona State University

A Black-Japanese Amerasian reflects on life in the present, with the traces of wars and their aftermaths.

In Dream of the Water Children, Fredrick Kakinami Cloyd delineates the ways imperialism and war are experienced across and between generations and leave lasting and often excruciating legacies in the mind, body, and relationships. The book is particularly good in detailing these costs as experienced by women and children, most vividly in cataloguing the life and emotions of Cloyd’s mother, and of Cloyd himself as a child and young man.

In incident after incident of military violence, sexual violence, social ostracism, intrafamilial cruelty, self-harm, and bullying, Cloyd shows how the social conditions created by war reverberate in our most intimate relationships. At the same time, Cloyd and his mother are never just victims: Cloyd’s spirited mother in particular defies stereotypes of Asian women and war brides as passive and silent. Throughout, Cloyd also traces moments of friendship and communal support among women and children of other mixed-race military families, as they navigated the conditions of multiple societies and cultural norms…

Read the entire preview here.

Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles

Scarecrow Press (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
January 1998
298 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57886-001-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4617-0708-0

James Overmyer, Member
Negro Leagues Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives and considered sports their exclusive domain. That her life story has remained unchronicled can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Baseball League.

This book furthers a growing awareness of black baseball before integration and profiles many of the other highly-competitive owners in the Negro league. It also describes a thriving black community in Newark that took the Newark Eagles into their hearts, creating a fascinating relationship between a community and their sports team.

This book was the first to draw extensively on Eagle team records, left behind by Mrs. Manley when she left Newark in the 1950s, and rediscovered nearly intact thirty-five years later. The files are the most comprehensive source of information about the Newark Eagles. They reconstruct the relationship between the baseball team and the community to an extent never thought to be possible. Also included is material from Mrs. Manley’s scrapbook chronicling her days as a baseball owner and an active home front volunteer during World War II. Her scrapbook is now part of the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

This important work shines the spotlight on a previously unsung segment of baseball history.

Originally published in cloth as Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles, No. 1 in the American Sports History Series.

When Ancestry Search Led To Escaped Slave: ‘All I Could Do Was Weep’

Fresh Air (From WHYY in Philadelphia)
National Public Radio
2016-01-18

Terry Gross, Host

When she was in fifth grade, Regina Mason received a school assignment that would change her life: to connect with her country of origin. That night, she went home and asked her mother where they were from.

“She told me about her grandfather who was a former slave,” Mason tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And that blew me away, because I’m thinking, ‘Slavery was like biblical times. It wasn’t just a few generations removed.’ ”

But for Mason, slavery was a few generations removed. She would later learn that her great-great-great-grandfather, a man named William Grimes, had been a runaway slave, and that he had authored what is now considered to be the first fugitive slave narrative.

“William Grimes’ narrative is precedent-setting,” Mason says. “[It] was published in 1825, and this was years before the abolitionist movement picked up slave narrative as a propaganda tool to end slavery. It sort of unwittingly paved the way for the American slave narrative to follow.”

Grimes’ original narrative tells the story of his 30 years spent in captivity, followed by his escape in 1814 from Savannah, Ga. He describes how his former owner discovered his whereabouts after the escape and forced him to give up his house in exchange for his freedom. (An updated version, published in 1855, includes a chapter about Grimes’ later life in poverty.)

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave was again republished in 2008 by Oxford University Press. The latest edition was edited by Mason and William Andrews, a scholar of early African-American autobiography…

…Interview Highlights

On learning from her mother that her ancestors had been slaves

She talked about Grandpa Fuller, who was a mulatto slave. And I inquired about his parentage and she told me that his father, from what she knew, was a plantation owner, and his mother was an enslaved black woman. …

And I’m asking, “Well, that’s weird. Did his father own him?” … I mean, how do you explain … to children that slavery existed in freedom-loving America, No. 1; and No. 2, how do you explain to a child about an enslaved heritage shrouded in miscegenation? It’s not an easy thing to do…

Read the story highlights here. Listen to the interview (00:35:55) here. Download the interview here.

Maud Sulter

The Herald
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
2008-03-21

Artist and writer; Born September 19, 1960; Died February 27, 2008. MAUD Sulter, who has died after a long illness aged 47, was an extraordinarily gifted visual artist, writer, playwright and cultural historian.

She was born in Glasgow, of Scots and Ghanaian descent: in her poem Circa 1930, she pointed out that these two cultures “are not as disparate as they might/at first seem. Clan-based societies/With long memories and global diasporas”. The exploration of the continuing presence of Africa in Europe was one of her principal themes, explored through her art in a variety of media: text, photography, sound and performance.

She was active in feminist communities in London in the early 1980s, and while working with a women’s education group programmed Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall showcasing black women’s creativity…

…As well as her academic writing, she published several collections of poetry: As a Blackwoman (1985), which won the Vera Bell Prize for poetry that year; Zabat (1989); and Sekhmet (Dumfries & Galloway Council, 2005); and a play about Jerry Rawlings, Service to Empire (2002). “I often address issues of lost and disputed territories, both psychological and physical,” she wrote in 1994. “The central body of my poetic work is unequivocally the love poetry which is addressed to both genders.” Sekhmet begins with a roll-call of love and gratitude to friends, lovers, family across the world, to medics, and to the ancestors, “who walked beside me when I needed them most and carried me forward when the terrain was too rough but never absolve me of the responsibility for my own life and identity”…

Read the entire obituary here.

A Russian-Chinese woman witnesses the ups and downs of the two nations’ ties

Global Times: Discover China, Discover The World
2015-10-30

Zhou Yu

Li Yingnan stands in her home. Her home is filled with Chinese and Russian books and decorations. Photo: Li Hao/GT

It was a sunny August day in Moscow when three shuttle buses stopped at Red Square. A group of women were the first of the dozens of tourists to step off the buses. Though their appearances were barely different from those of ordinary Russians, they were, in fact, Chinese citizens, aged between 50 to 80.

“I was born in Moscow,” said one 80-year-old lady tearfully.

The ladies belonged to a tour group called Russian Mothers Seeking Roots in Russia, and all were the descendants of Russians. It was the first time since the end of World War II that a group of people seeking their roots had been organized by Chinese citizens.

For the next seven days, they would tour major sites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These old ladies were so excited to see their ancestors’ hometowns, some even dancing on Red Square. Russian WWII veterans told them about the joint military operations between the two countries during the war.

Most of the group members’ mothers were Russians who came to China during the 1930s. In the 1920s, there were around 200,000 Chinese laborers who lived and worked in Russia doing construction work or running shops. Some Chinese workers participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917, and others even joined Russia’s Red Army.

At the end of the 1920s, when the Soviet Union’s strict economic planning system was implemented, the Soviet government closed down all private shops and forced Chinese shop owners to leave the country. Many of these Chinese businessmen had married Russian women, who followed their husbands back to China. Due to Russia’s geographical proximity of Xinjiang, most of these Russian-Chinese couples settled in Xinjiang and the women became Chinese citizens. There are around 15,000 such descendants of Russians still in China…

Read the entire article here.

Remembering Julian Bond (1940-2015)

Politico
2015-12-29

Josh Zeitz

Getty

For many Americans, Julian Bond, who died in August at age 75, was quite literally the voice of the modern civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, when he served as communications director for the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and in later years, as a prominent author, university lecturer and narrator of the acclaimed PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, he embodied the dignity and righteousness of the black freedom struggle. “Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life,” President Obama said in the wake of his passing. “Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”

The son of Horace Mann Bond, an acclaimed black educator who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Julian grew up in middle-class comfort and respectability in southeast Pennsylvania, where his father served for more than a decade as president of Lincoln University, a historically black college. A virtual who’s-who of American intelligentsia passed through the door of his childhood home. As a young boy, he sat in Paul Robeson’s lap as the famed activist and baritone sang a Russian folk song for the family. He met W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Einstein. As an adult, he still recalled the excitement of a visit from Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP. “When he pulled up to our house, he was in a big, black shiny car escorted by two Pennsylvania state troopers on motorcycles with big leather boots,” Bond later told an interviewer, “I thought, boy, this is an important guy. This guy’s really something.”

Bond, who attended high school at an integrated Quaker institution in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, knew little of segregation growing up. He was only four or five years old the first time he learned there was “some category of people I belonged to,” as he recalled in an oral history many decades after the fact. Walking with his parents through the train station in Nashville, where they had arrived for a visit with extended family, “a policeman came up to my mother and said, ‘Niggers aren’t allowed here.’ She said, ‘Are you calling me a nigger?’ I don’t know if it was because she was very fair skinned and might have been white, although she didn’t appear white to me, or if it was her manner with the policeman. He was just taken aback. He didn’t say anything else, and we just kept on going.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tiger Woods at 40: The 14-time major champion’s legacy

BBC Sport
2015-12-30

Iain Carter, Golf Correspondent

Masters 2001: Woods seals ‘Tiger’ slam

Imagine Earl Woods choosing to put a baseball bat rather than a golf club into the hands of young Eldrick, his toddler son.

How different would golf be if Tiger Woods, who turns 40 on 30 December, had chosen to play something else?

As the ailing 14-time major champion struggles to swing a club again, he can celebrate this landmark birthday by reflecting that no-one has had a bigger impact on the game…

…Woods was golf’s poster boy. He was different – a black man in an overwhelmingly white sport – and he became the inspiration for the players who populate the top of the current world rankings.

“What Tiger Woods has done for golf, I’m not sure anyone would do again,” four-time major champion Rory McIlroy told the BBC.

“Not just how unbelievably talented he was, but what he stood for, where he came from. He brought a whole new demographic into golf and sort of made golf cool again for kids.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘True Detective’ Helmer Cary Fukunaga Teams With John Legend For Pulitzer Winner ‘The Black Count’

Deadline Hollywood
2014-04-28

Dominic Patten

EXCLUSIVE: On fire since the success of HBO‘s True Detective this year, director Cary Fukunaga has lined up his next project I’ve learned. Teaming with John Legend and his Get Lifted Film Co. partner Mike Jackson, Fukunaga will adapt and helm a big-screen version of The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, And The Real Count of Monte Cristo for Sony. Get Lifted have optioned the Pulitzer-winning 2012 biography written by Tom Reiss that chronicles the life and adventures of French Revolution-era General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas…

Read the entire article here.

The many faces of Frederick Douglass

Democrat and Chronicle
Rochester, New York
2015-12-25

Jim Memmott, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

Portrait of Frederick Douglass taken November 3, 1882 by John Howe Kent, 24 State Street, Rochester, New York (Photo: Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, University of Rochester River Campus Libraries)

In November 1882, Frederick Douglass, escaped slave, orator, abolitionist, writer, lecturer, was back in Rochester, the city where he had lived for nearly 30 years, to give a talk.

Not surprisingly, he found time to visit the studio of Rochester photographer John Howe Kent to pose for a portrait.

The photograph, which is among the collection of the University of Rochester, shows a white-haired, bearded and contemplative Douglass. He looks away from the camera, his brow furrowed, his eyes on a distant prize.

According to the authors of a rich and rewarding book, the recently published Picturing Frederick Douglass, Kent’s picture became a lasting image of Douglass. It was used as the illustration facing the title page of the last edition of Douglass’s autobiography. And it was reproduced again and again on monuments, on a postage stamp and in drawings.

As the subtitle of Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American makes clear, the Rochester picture is just one of many of Douglass taken during a time when photography was coming of age.

The authors of the book, John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier, have identified 160 separate photographs of Douglass, a handful taken in Rochester, and all republished in the book.

Read the entire article here.