Book of the Month

Destiny’s Dilemma

An African American woman moved home to take care of her dying mother giving up the opportunity to experience a world beyond segregation. Zoraida Hughes Williams finds that some things have changed about her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas while some have stayed the same, like Hell’s Half Acre, an area where saloons, prostitution and gambling runs wild. Like most of the residents, she wants to keep her head down and stay away from trouble, but it comes in the unlikely form of an Anglo Baptist preacher. He messes up everything and almost gets them killed.

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Destiny’s Dilemma

Black History Month

Jacob Lawrence is renowned for his narrative painting series that chronicles the experiences of African Americans, which he created during a career of more than six decades. Using geometric shapes and bold colors on flattened picture planes to express his emotions, he fleshed out the lives of Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and African Americans migrating north from the rural south during and after slavery. Lawrence was 12 in 1929 when his family settled in Harlem, New York, at a time when African American intellectual and artistic life was flourishing there.

Kara Walker’s art has been exhibited across the globe. Her 1994 room-sized mural, titled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, brought her into the art world spotlight. The work consists of black cut-out silhouettes and depicts narratives of slavery and racism in the history of the south.

Black History Month

Charles White, the meticulous draftsman used his skill to render human emotion and endurance in the face of such obstacles as discrimination. His works from the 1950s, the decade when the civil rights struggle exploded in the United States, show the cost of such perseverance in images of black men and women fighting for social justice.

Artist and author Faith Ringgold was inspired by the fabrics used by her mother when she was a child. She has written children’s books, taught visual art, and produced narrative works about gender and race. Notably, Ringgold helped form an activist committee in the 1970s protesting the inequal presence of female artists at the Whitney Biennial. Her mosaics are present in subway stations, and her sculptures and quilts, such as the 1985 Flag Story Quilt, are part of permanent collections in New York City.