Classic African American Literature Book Club

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In 1989, a cache of some 9800 dissected and amputated human bones - more than 75 percent of them African American - was found in the earthen basement floor of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. To re-create the social context and medical practices that led to the bones' clandestine disposal before 1910, Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington assembled a team of archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, historians, experimental anatomists, and ethnographers. Together they argue that the procurement of cadavers by American medical schools was part of a racist system that viewed African Americans as expendable not only in life but also after death. Contributors show that notions of a separate "Negro medicine" did not prevent professors from using African American bodies to teach their students how to treat white patients. Other essays shed light on the importance of surgical training at a time when amputation was a primary means of treatment. Still others examine the bony evidence of diet and disease in a nineteenth-century urban black population. Taking a broad approach to the study of a single, well-preserved site, Bones in the Basement presents the work of both African American and Euro-American researchers and includes interviews with residents of Augusta today.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection - The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

"Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs." --The New Yorker

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Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope, he discovered, has long been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation that comes out of traditional Black churches. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded or viewed with suspicion by much of the wider church and academy, but it has something vital to say.
Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. He advocates for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. McCaulley demonstrates this model with studies on how Scripture speaks to topics often overlooked by white interpreters, such as ethnicity, political protest, policing, and slavery.
Ultimately McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.