Liberian Literary Magazine
Between the World
Me Hardcover by Ta-Nehisi Coates
and
“This is your country, this is
your world, this is your body,
and you must find some way
to live within the all of it.”
In a profound work that
pivots from the biggest
questions about American
history and ideals to the most
intimate concerns of a father
for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates
offers a powerful new
framework for understanding
our nation’s history and
current crisis. Americans have
built an empire on the idea of
“race,” a falsehood that
damages us all but falls most
heavily on the bodies of black
women and men—bodies
exploited through slavery and
segregation, and, today,
threatened, locked up, and
murdered
out
of
all
proportion. What is it like to
inhabit a black body and find
a way to live within it? And
how can we all honestly
reckon with this fraught
history and free ourselves
from its burden?
Between the World and Me
is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt
to answer these questions in a
Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture
letter to his adolescent son.
Coates shares with his son—
and readers—the story of his
awakening to the truth about
his place in the world through
a
series
of
revelatory
experiences, from Howard
University to Civil War
battlefields, from the South
Side of Chicago to Paris, from
his childhood home to the
living rooms of mothers whose
children’s lives were taken as
American plunder. Beautifully
woven
from
personal
narrative, reimagined history,
and
fresh,
emotionally
charged reportage, Between
the World and Me clearly
illuminates
the
past,
bracingly
confronts
our
present,
and
offers
a
transcendent vision for a way
forward.
At The Dark End of The
Street by Danielle L McGuire
Rosa Parks was often
described as a sweet and
reticent elderly woman whose
tired feet caused her to defy
segregation on Montgomery’s
city buses,
and whose
supposedly
solitary,
11
spontaneous act sparked the
1955 bus boycott that gave
birth to the civil rights
movement.
The truth of who Rosa Parks
was and what really lay
beneath the 1955 boycott is
far different from anything
previously written.
In this groundbreaking and
important book, Danielle
McGuire writes about the
rape in 1944 of a twenty-fouryear-old
mother
and
sharecropper, Recy Taylor,
who strolled toward home
after an evening of singing
and praying at the Rock Hill
Holiness Church in Abbeville,
Alabama. Seven white men,
armed with knives and
shotguns, ordered the young
woman into their green
Chevrolet, raped her, and left
her for dead. The president of
the local NAACP branch office
sent his best investigator and
organizer to Abbeville. Her
name was Rosa Parks. In
taking on this case, Parks
launched a movement that
ultimately
changed
the
world.
The author gives us the
never-before-told history of
how the civil rights movement
began; how it was in part
started in protest against the
ritualistic rape of black
women by white men who
used economic intimidation,
sexual violence, and terror to
derail
the
freedom
movement; and how those
forces persisted unpunished
throughout the Jim Crow era
when white men assaulted
black women to enforce rules
of racial and economic
hierarchy. Black women’s
protests
against
sexual
assault and interracial rape