"I will wear no chain!" : a social history of African-American males /

This is a searing account of how African American men have struggled against the exploitative, debasing, emasculating effects of white supremacy for almost 400 years. It traces the appalling story of the African American holocaust, through slavery, lynching, segregation, race riots, ghettoization, exclusion from employment, and modern police brutality. Booker writes a social history of black masculinity and the systematic assault on black manhood without reducing black men to the role of victimized objects who were merely acted on by all-powerful external forces. The author makes effective use of the narratives of former slaves such as Josiah Henson, who describes his father fighting back against an overseer who attempted to whip his mother. Booker highlights the impact of men such as David Walker, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, William Monroe Trotter, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture, as well as the significance of black veterans and the Black Panthers. The final two chapters, which explore figures and topics such as Colin Powell, O.J. Simpson, Willie Horton, Louis Farrakhan, the Million Man March, and the prison-industrial complex, are especially poignant. A splendid, compelling achievement for all collections. W. Glasker; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden