Showing results for "The Letters" in State & Local

April 16th, the year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama, has had a spring of nonviolent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against Blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers longed to create a nonviolent tension so severe that the powers that be would be forced to address the rampant racism head on. Recently arrested was Martin Luther King, Jr.... It is there in that jail cell that he writes this letter; on the margins of a newspaper he pens this defense of nonviolence against segregation.

The Willie Lynch method of “making a slave” is perhaps the greatest dilemma that has ever plagued African Americans. It does not matter if the speech was genuine or fiction. If you have not read the book “The Willie Lynch Letter and The Making of a Slave” or never heard of the Willie Lynch Letter, this book will quote several passages to give you a complete and unequivocal intent of the Letter.

Unsatisfied with the relentless pace and narrow constraints of social media, two Americans—Winkfield Twyman, Jr. and Jennifer Richmond, a black man and a white woman—rediscovered the art of letter writing and maintained a years-long correspondence about race in the United States. At a time when many Americans are dazed, confused, and angered by the country's current state of race relations, they offer a model not only for having needed but difficult conversations but also for a better way forward.

What begins as yet another assignment for a reporter, a young millennial who relies happily on email and texting as the primary means of communication, develops into a heartfelt mission to tell the story of the people and places in the letters. Dead Letters is an intimate portrait of small-town America and the people who, at times, risked everything in pursuit of economic prosperity, religious freedom, and social equity.

In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this awful discovery, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived as a volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. Teaching biology to Freedom School students in Meridian, Luke became one of more than seven hundred student volunteers who joined experienced Black civil rights workers and clergy to challenge white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state.

This was the American Civil War for many who lived it, overwhelming and ultimately tragic, viewed through the eyes of a courageous youth and an unforgettable young woman.

Educated in Amherst, Massachusetts, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819-1906) accompanied her physician-husband to California in 1849. The Shirley Letters (1922) is the book edition of a series of letters written by Mrs. Clappe to her sister in 1851 and 1852. They were first published under the pseudonym of Dame Shirley in the Pioneer magazine, 1854-55. In these letters, Louise Clappe writes of life in San Francisco and the Feather River mining communities of Rich Bar and Indian Bar.

The Huck Finn of foreign correspondents provides a colorful account of old Honolulu, the island nobility, the City of Refuge on the Kona coast, and the active volcano of Kilauea. These selections of Mark Twain's newspaper dispatches are both charming and informative. The light touch of the great humorist is seldom missing as he reveals the "loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean".

In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, these essays bring a storyteller's gifts to life's dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory.