99988 in stock

    You may also like

    Customer Reviews

    Based on 1 review
    100%
    (1)
    0%
    (0)
    0%
    (0)
    0%
    (0)
    0%
    (0)
    R
    Robin Friedman

    Black Life On Wilmington's East Side

    The United States has many small communities that are little-known and that bear celebrating. Among these communities is the East Side of Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington's East Side is an old residential community which has gone through many changes over the years. Early in the 20th Century, the East Side became African American in demographics with the migration of many people from Southern States, including rural Maryland's Eastern Shore. Hara Wright-Smith tells the story of the East Side's African American community in this book, "African Americans of Wilmington's East Side" (2022), a photographic history published by Images of America. A native of Newcastle County, Delaware, Wright-Smith received her PhD in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania and wrote her dissertation on Wilmington's East Side.

    This book is an inspiration as it captures a slice of American life. Wright-Smith aims to capture the spirit of a community through the 1960s as it struggled with Jim Crow and racial segregation. The residents of the East Side, about 1,000 -- 1,200 people -- held their heads high, kept family, communal, economic, and religious ties, and moved forward. The book's primary intended audience is the community itself and its surroundings as Wright-Smith says her book "attempts to capture the importance of positive self-image among residents who shared in a struggle for equality, dignity and a common reverence for a place that faced an unforgiving degree of overt racism and discrimination that plagued all of Black America during this period."

    The book is a hymn to ordinary life, with its difficulties and stresses. It emphasizes family, particularly in its opening chapter. It shows long-term residents who came from the South and stayed to build their lives. Some of the people shown became well-known as community activitists and as professionals in medicine, law, or education. The images and stories of these people are juxtaposed with stories of people who were blue collar workers and with those who had to struggle for a living. The people in the photographs, (which come from historical society files or from the collections of indviduals) are invariably well-dressed and face the camera with a sense of pride and purpose. I was moved to see the passion that has gone into this book and the spirit of community in its people.

    This spirit continues through the study with photographs and discussions of many Black owned businesses and places where residents of the East Side worked. The book has a heavy emphasis on religion and education, with a chapter devoted to the many churches in the area, many of which have a long history, and the schools. In particular, Howard High School was for many years the only high school open to African American students in the Wilmington area, and it was a party to the desegregation litigation in "Brown v. Board of Education." The book offers many photos of the teachers and students at Howard High School and their stories. The book also explores the cultural life of the East Side and closes by touching upon the urban renewal projects that radically changed the character of the area.

    The book moved me to explore a little further, and I found reviews of the book and interviews with the author in some Delaware publications, including a review and interview with the author by Sydney Livingston in "Delaware Today" of May 6, 2022. With the publication of this book, Hara-Smith also worked for about two years as the director of economic activity and inclusion for the Wilmington Alliance to provide support for entrepreneurs and small businesses in Wilmington, including the East Side. I learned as well that the East Side fell upon hard times following the period discussed in Wright-Smith's book. Many of the old homes are boarded up, businesses have closed, and the area suffers from crime and blight. The city of Wilmington spent, as of 2024, over $18 million to revitalize the East Side. My understanding is that it is still a work in progress.

    I had no knowledge of Wilmington's East Side other than this book and my slight follow-up reading. It was good to learn about this community and about the character of its residents and to see the author's love and enthusiasm for her subject. It is valuable to keep the spirit of America's local communities alive.

    You may also like

    Cover image for The Last Children of Mill Creek, isbn: 9781948742641
    The Last Children of Mill Creek
    Paperback
    $18.95 $14.21 Save 25%
    Cover image for North Carolina Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090201
    North Carolina Slave Narratives
    Paperback
    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%
    Cover image for South Carolina Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090232
    South Carolina Slave Narratives
    Paperback
    $16.95 $12.71 Save 25%
    Cover image for Virginia Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090256
    Virginia Slave Narratives
    Paperback
    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%
    Cover image for Alabama Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090102
    Alabama Slave Narratives
    Paperback
    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%

    The Last Children of Mill Creek

    9781948742641

    $18.95 $14.21 Save 25%

    A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before “urban renewal” changed everything.

    Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as “progress.” A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson’s large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”

    Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

    Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek

    2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner

    Missouri's “Great Reads from Great Places” Selection for the 2023 National Book Festival

     

    “This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain.” —TheLos Angeles Review of Books
    Cover image for The Last Children of Mill Creek, isbn: 9781948742641

    North Carolina Slave Narratives

    9781557090201

    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%
    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected North Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
    Cover image for North Carolina Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090201

    South Carolina Slave Narratives

    9781557090232

    $16.95 $12.71 Save 25%
    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected South Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
    Cover image for South Carolina Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090232

    Virginia Slave Narratives

    9781557090256

    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%
    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection—a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of all of the Virginia narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
    Cover image for Virginia Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090256

    Alabama Slave Narratives

    9781557090102

    $14.95 $11.21 Save 25%
    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected Alabama narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
    Cover image for Alabama Slave Narratives, isbn: 9781557090102

    Underground Railroad in Ohio, The

    9781467153201

    $23.99 $17.99 Save 25%

    Ohio was at the heart of it all.

    During a dark time in United States history, thousands of freedom seekers traveled the Underground Railroad through Ohio. The Buckeye State hosted about half of all fugitive slave traffic of the antebellum era. A mix of Northern and Southern settlers in the state added drama to a struggle that led to major benefits for the state and the country. Unfortunately, this epic past was obscured by silence and secrecy and then distorted with misinformation and folklore—until now.

    Author and native Ohioan Kathy Schulz accurately details the development and workings of Ohio’s Underground Railroad with true stories of Addison White, John Parker and others.

    Cover image for Underground Railroad in Ohio, The, isbn: 9781467153201
    Back to African American Heritage