The Handy African American History Answer Book, by Jessie Carney Smith. Canton, OH: Visible Ink Press, 2014, 432 pp., $21.95, paperback.This unique Q/A book gathers more than 700 stories, events, expressions, facts, and things everyone should know about the African American history and popular culture. The author, Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, is professor and librarian at Fisk University in Nashville. The author of numerous scholarly works and contributor for many encyclopedias, this is her fourth book about African American culture with this publisher.This Handy African American History Answer Book juxtaposes questions and answers, but most topics will probably be unknown to readers, even for those familiar with African American studies. In that sense, this rigorous book is not firstly made for quizzes or guessing games among friends, rather for studying and discovering the many dimensions of cross-cultural and race studies with the U.S. context.The 14 sections are thematically organized, highlighting the important dimensions of African American life and contribution in Arts, Business, Civil Rights, Education, plus ten other fields. However, this vast repertoire is not meant to just praise the many achievements by noted African Americans in various domains; its strength is to aptly explain the often hidden dimensions of everyday African American life over the past five centuries. Since one finds an average of two questions in about every page, answers are not too short but rather detailed and nuanced. More importantly, this guide also provides timely explanations about the symbolic significance of events or places that general dictionaries cannot easily contextualize. For example, the entry about the Apollo Theater in Harlem indicates that it was not just a building located on 125th Street in New York City, adding that It was one of the first theaters in the nation to feature Black artists and to be available to other minorities (p. 32).The fifth section on Education contains a great diversity of topics and many good surprises. For example, what is referred to as the Rock Nine were the nine heroic Black students who in the context of school desegregation during 1957 dared to integrate the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and thereby proved their courageous self-restraint in the face of extreme provocation and peril (p. 124). Elsewhere, after the question Who was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University? we find a praising presentation of educator and author W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), who received his Ph.D. in history in 1895. Almost three decades later, the first three African American women to ever earn a doctoral degree have graduated in 1921. But the first Black student to ever graduate (at any level) from the University of Alabama was Vivian Malone Jones, in 1965. Sadly, Jessie Carney Smith adds that Miss Malone Jones and a Black colleague had to be escorted by the National Guard to register (p. 117). And that was only half a century ago.Further on, one learns that the first public school for Blacks opened in 1870 in Virginia. …
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