Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore some of the books that SIU Press is promoting for Black History Month.
These include biographies, histories, poetry collections, and more. In the groundbreaking From Du Bois to Obama: African American Intellectuals in the Public Forum, Charles Pete Banner-Haley explores the history of African American intellectualism and reveals the effects of Black intellectuals on the ongoing struggle against racism, showing how they have responded to Jim Crow segregation, violence against Black Americans, and the subtler racism of the post-integration age.
Dave Baron’s Pembroke: A Rural, Black Community on the Illinois Dunes, won an ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication in 2017. With a population of about two thousand, Pembroke Township, one of the largest rural, Black communities north of the Mason-Dixon Line, sits in an isolated corner of Kankakee County, Illinois, sixty-five miles south of Chicago.
Duty beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920, by Le’Trice D. Donaldson, locates the often-overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of Black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights.
In Smith Blue, Camille T. Dungy offers a survival guide for the modern heart as she takes on twenty-first-century questions of love, loss, and nature.
Melissa Ford’s A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression won a 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence in “Books, Scholarly.” Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement.
In Ruby Berkley Goodwin’s It’s Good to Be Black, the Black she writes about has nothing to do with skin color, but it does have a great deal to do with self-images, values, spiritual strength, and, most of all, love.
Red Clay Suite, the third book of poems from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon.
