A Wealth of Wisdom


Book Description

A collection of reminiscences, personal anecdotes, and words of wisdom from fifty-four African American leaders over the age of seventy includes Ossie Davis, David Dinkins, Dick Gregory, Coretta Scott King, and Maya Angelou.




From Here to Equality, Second Edition


Book Description

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. This compelling and sharply argued book addresses economic injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War and offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. This new edition features a new foreword addressing the latest developments on the local, state, and federal level and considering current prospects for a comprehensive reparations program.




At the Elbows of My Elders


Book Description

"Black families throughout the United States were fighting segregation in their local communities for decades before the civil rights movement. Their everyday battles (both individual and institutional) built the foundation for the more publicized crusade to follow. In this memoir, Gail Milissa Grant draws back the curtain on those times and presents touching vignettes of a life most Americans know nothing about. She recounts the battles fought by her father, David M. Grant, a lawyer and civil rights activist in St. Louis, and describes the challenges she faced in navigating her way through institutions marked by racial prejudice."--BOOK JACKET.




Gems from the Elders


Book Description

Words of wisdom deeply rooted in truth and experience have long been a staple in Black culture, speech, and dialogue. Whether spoken with love from a grandparent, delivered with passion by a pastor in a pulpit, or offered from knowing stranger with hair peppered with grey, there are certain phrases that have been cited and shared time and time again within the Black community. This book highlights just fifteen African-American proverbs, though countless more exist. Like the elders who use them, they offer lessons in guidance and grace to all those who are willing to listen and learn.




Black Elders


Book Description

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs’ escape from slavery? In Black Elders, Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, including slave narratives, plantation records, letters, diaries, meeting minutes, and state and federal archives, Knight also examines how blacks and whites, men and women, the young and the old developed competing ideas about age and aging, differences that shaped social relations in coastal West and West Central Africa, the Atlantic and domestic slave trades, colonial and antebellum Southern slave societies, and emancipation in the North and South. Black Elders offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.




The Black Elderly


Book Description

In The Black Elderly: Satisfaction and Quality of Later Life, authors Marguerite Coke and James Twaite present the results of an empirical study of factors that influence the well-being of older black Americans. Like all older individuals in industrial nations, elderly blacks are confronted with negative attitudes toward old people. But in spite of their minority status in society, with its economic and social disadvantages, elderly blacks have effective coping strategies for dealing with growing old. It is the success of these coping strategies that the authors reveal to readers and upon which they build recommendations to encourage healthy aging in the black community.Through comprehensive research into the subject, the authors provide readers with a theoretical framework which identifies the variables that are most closely associated with subjective well-being among older Blacks. An empirical test of the model is described and the questionnaire is included.Professionals and scholars in social work, gerontology, African-American studies, and anthropology will find The Black Elderly a positive approach to supporting the elderly black community. Readers with interests in cross-cultural aspects of counseling and gerontology will find much enlightenment in this book with its research and insight on: history: overviews West African culture and the role of history in the development of the black American family church: analyzes the function and importance of this institution on the black community family: explores the importance of family and how it affects life satisfaction health: determines how perceived health status affects individuals'feelings of life satisfactionThe authors'findings on the strong and diverse support systems of this group assist professionals, students, and policymakers in better understanding how to continue to effect healthy aging for black Americans. The Black Elderly is of particular interest to social workers, students in social work programs, and professionals who deal with aging persons or the black community and can benefit from historical background knowledge of blacks in this country and how societal institutions affect the well-being of this group.







Racial and Ethnic Differences in the Health of Older Americans


Book Description

Older Americans, even the oldest, can now expect to live years longer than those who reached the same ages even a few decades ago. Although survival has improved for all racial and ethnic groups, strong differences persist, both in life expectancy and in the causes of disability and death at older ages. This book examines trends in mortality rates and selected causes of disability (cardiovascular disease, dementia) for older people of different racial and ethnic groups. The determinants of these trends and differences are also investigated, including differences in access to health care and experiences in early life, diet, health behaviors, genetic background, social class, wealth and income. Groups often neglected in analyses of national data, such as the elderly Hispanic and Asian Americans of different origin and immigrant generations, are compared. The volume provides understanding of research bearing on the health status and survival of the fastest-growing segment of the American population.




Crying for Our Elders


Book Description

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has defined the childhoods of an entire generation. Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the disease. But in Crying for Our Elders, anthropologist Kristen E. Cheney argues that these humanitarian groups have misread the ‘orphan crisis’. She explains how the global humanitarian focus on orphanhood often elides the social and political circumstances that actually present the greatest adversity to vulnerable children—in effect deepening the crisis and thereby affecting children’s lives as irrevocably as HIV/AIDS itself. Through ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research with children in Uganda, Cheney traces how the “best interest” principle that governs children’s’ rights can stigmatize orphans and leave children in the post-antiretroviral era even more vulnerable to exploitation. She details the dramatic effects this has on traditional family support and child protection and stresses child empowerment over pity. Crying for Our Elders advances current discussions on humanitarianism, children’s studies, orphanhood, and kinship. By exploring the unique experience of AIDS orphanhood through the eyes of children, caregivers, and policymakers, Cheney shows that despite the extreme challenges of growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, the post-ARV generation still holds out hope for the future.




Honoring Elders


Book Description

Like many Native Americans, Ojibwe people esteem the wisdom, authority, and religious significance of old age, but this respect does not come easily or naturally. It is the fruit of hard work, rooted in narrative traditions, moral vision, and ritualized practices of decorum that are comparable in sophistication to those of Confucianism. Even as the dispossession and policies of assimilation have threatened Ojibwe peoplehood and have targeted the traditions and the elders who embody it, Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe communities have been resolute and resourceful in their disciplined respect for elders. Indeed, the challenges of colonization have served to accentuate eldership in new ways. Using archival and ethnographic research, Michael D. McNally follows the making of Ojibwe eldership, showing that deference to older women and men is part of a fuller moral, aesthetic, and cosmological vision connected to the ongoing circle of life a tradition of authority that has been crucial to surviving colonization. McNally argues that the tradition of authority and the authority of tradition frame a decidedly indigenous dialectic, eluding analytic frameworks of invented tradition and naïve continuity. Demonstrating the rich possibilities of treating age as a category of analysis, McNally provocatively asserts that the elder belongs alongside the priest, prophet, sage, and other key figures in the study of religion.