C. Eric Lincoln

In Coming through the Fire, prominent scholar and writer C. Eric Lincoln addresses the most important issue of our time with insights forged by a lifetime of confronting racial oppression in America. Born in a small rural town in northern Alabama, raised by his grandparents, Lincoln portrays in rich detail the nuances of racial conflict and control that characterized the community of Athens, personal experiences that would lead him to dedicate his life to illuminating issues of race and social identity. . Coming through the Fire, with its fiercely intelligent, passionate, and clear-eyed view of race and class conflict, makes a major contribution to understanding - and thereby healing - the terrible rift that has opened up in the heart of America. Lincoln explores the nature of biracial relationships, the issue of transracial adoption, violence - particularly black-on-black violence - the "endangered" black male, racism as power, the relationship between blacks and Jews, our multicultural melting pot, and Minister Louis Farrakhan. Without sidestepping painful issues, or sacrificing a righteous anger, the author argues for "no-fault reconciliation," for mutual recognition of the human endowment we share regardless of race, preparing us as a nation for the true multiculture tomorrow will demand.

The lives, dreams, triumphs, and tragedies of a group of characters center around a mythical avenue in a mythical southern town, in a portrait of the South just prior to World War II. The Avenue in C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the principal residential street of the black community in Clayton City, a prototypical southern town languishing between the two world wars. Unpaved and marked by ditches full of frogs, snakes, and empty whiskey bottles on one side of town, it is the same street, though with a different name, that originates downtown. Only when it reaches the black section of Clayton City do the paving stop and the trash-filled ditches begin. On one side, it provides a significant address for the white people who live there. On the other, despite its rundown air, it is still the best address available to the town’s black population. Some of them, in fact, are willing to go to any extreme, including murder, to get there.

Few books in the history of publishing have proved so useful and long-lasting as this pioneering work in the popular history of African Americans. The first edition appeared in 1956, on the eve of the civil rights revolution. A highly original attempt to portray a crucial but long-neglected part of the American past, it soon became a standard work on black history. Its rich variety of more than 1,300 illustrations - paintings, drawings, cartoons, prints, posters, broadsides, daguerreotypes, photographs, sheet music covers, title pages, and stills from television and films - brings home to readers young and old the look and feel of the dynamic past. This sixth edition captures the changes on the national scene that have influenced African American life during the Reagan-Bush years and the first stages of the Clinton administration. The new text and photographs illuminate social, economic, political, and cultural trends. The authors discuss government and politics, civil rights, arts and letters, sports, labor and employment, schools, the church, and the mass media, highlighting the role of black leaders who have come to the fore in recent years.

This book, in graphic novel format, describes the life of civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. and gives a brief summary of historical events that affected his life.