Greater Book Features: Empowering Underserved Communities

There are several ideas on empowering underserved communities that historically have gained consensus:

• One of the thoughts that has gained consensus is that, to empower Black communities we must educate them;
• The other consensus is that we can’t effectively educate our communities without teaching them history.

There is a famous saying, “if you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book.” Greater Diversity News is providing a 400-year history of the Black experience in America for “free!”

GDN has created one of the most empowering education initiatives about the Black experience in America.  

How many of you watch or are familiar with Book TV?  It is a C-Span2 television program whose motto is “Television for Serious Readers.” The books are written by acknowledged experts in their subject areas.

My undergraduate degree is in History & Political Science.  Each week GDN features a major book review on the Black experience in America.  In addition to the book review, we link a video clip interview of the author.  C-Span2, either conducts & records the interviews or records other interviews conducted at major book festivals across the country.  I am developing a suggested reading priority of the books.

There are approximately 300 books and interviews relative to the Black experience in America archived on the C-Span2 website.  I select the books and decide the order of publication.  Community leaders and other interested individuals should subscribe to our (free) weekly eNews and ask all of their families, friends, organizational members and other interested people to subscribe to our free eNews by going to: greaterdiversity.com/eNews

I recommend reading our book reviews and viewing the video clips in the following order. (1). Michelle Alexander:  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; (2). Douglas Blackmon:  Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II; (3). Rev. William Barber:  The Third Reconstruction.  All of these sources are archived at https://9c5996605f.nxcli.net/category/book-reviews/.  Other publications that should receive high priority are Susan Burton:  Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women; Ari Berman: Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America; Angela J. Davis: Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment.