"Ain't But a Place": An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis.Early, Gerald, ed. "Ain't But a Place": An Anthology of African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. Writings About St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical P, 1998. 515 pp.$39.95 cloth/$24.95 paper. Compared to New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of and Chicago, other centers of African American life and culture have been relatively neglected. With this rich collection the distinguished essayist Gerald Early Gerald Early (b. 1952) is an essayist and American culture critic. A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he is currently the Merle Kling Professor of Modern letters, of English, African studies, African American studies , American culture studies, and Director, Center for Joint has gone a long way toward rectifying this situation for the great mid-continental city on the Mississippi. "Ain't But a Place" samples a variety of writings concerning St. Louis (and East St. Louis), from slave narratives to the poetry of Jabari Asim. Sports figures such as Henry Armstrong Henry Jackson Jr. (December 12, 1912 - October 22, 1988) was a world boxing champion who fought under the name Henry Armstrong. The son of a sharecropper and America Armstrong, an Iroquois Indian, Henry Jr. , Archie Moore For the baseball player, see . Archie Moore, whose birth name was Archibald Wright (December 13 1913 – December 9 1998), was light heavyweight world boxing champion between 1952 and 1959 (and again in 1961) and had one of the longest professional careers in the history , Sonny Liston Noun 1. Sonny Liston - United States prizefighter who lost his world heavyweight championship to Cassius Clay in 1964 (1932-1970) Charles Liston, Liston , Quincy Trouppe (pere), Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, and Jackie JoynerKersee tell their own stories, as do musicians and performers Josephine Baker, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and Katherine Dunham. Included also are writers known to all readers of African American Review--William Wells Brown, Elizabeth Keckley, Early himself, Du Bois, Hughes, Bontemps, ntozake shange, Henry Dumas, Eugene B. Redmond, Quincy Troupe (fils)--but some of us will need reminders of their St. Louis connections, provided in every case by the edito r. Admittedly some items in this anthology, mainly those in the second half of the book, will be of interest mainly to readers with connections to the city, but Early has assembled an ample collection about one of the major places of the African American experience. One hopes that similar anthologies will be compiled for Washington and Atlanta and Detroit. Early has set a very high standard for such works in this volume. |
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