Defining Moments in Black History

NAACP 2017 Image Award Winner

With his trademark acerbic wit, incisive humor, and infectious paranoia, one in all our foremost comedians and most politically engaged civil rights activists seems again at 100 key occasions from the difficult historical past of black America.

A pal of luminaries together with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of at present’s widespread black comics, together with Larry Wilmore, W. Kamau Bell, Damon Young, and Trevor Noah, Dick Gregory was a provocative and incisive cultural power for greater than fifty years. As an entertainer, he at all times stored it indisputably actual about race points in America, fearlessly lacing laughter with arduous truths. As a number one activist towards injustice, he marched at Selma throughout the Civil Rights motion, organized scholar rallies to protest the Vietnam War; sat in at rallies for Native American and feminist rights; fought apartheid in South Africa; and took part in starvation strikes in help of Black Lives Matter.

In this assortment of considerate, provocative essays, Gregory charts the advanced and infrequently obscured historical past of the African American expertise. In his unapologetically candid voice, he strikes from African ancestry and surviving the Middle Passage to the enjoyment of bacon and all the things pig, the headline-making shootings of black males, and the Black Lives Matter motion. A fascinating journey via time, Defining Moments in Black History explores historic actions similar to The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, in addition to cultural touchstones similar to Sidney Poitier successful the Best Actor Oscar for Lilies in the Field and Billie Holiday releasing Strange Fruit.

An partaking take a look at black life that gives insightful commentary on the intricate historical past of the African American individuals, Defining Moments in Black History is a vital, no-holds-bar historical past lesson that can provoke, enlighten, and entertain.