Sunny Nash is now sharing her thoughts, discussions, opinions and research on Huffington Post through HuffPost Social News and providing social commentary on education, politics, history, media, entertainment, business and current topics of interest.
Sunny Nash, contributor to hundreds of journals, magazines, collections and anthologies, is an award-winning author, a former newspaper columnist for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers, exhibiting photographer, commercial radio news director and talk show host, program director for National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, magazine writer-editor-photographer, television writer and producer, and author of several popular social blogs, including…
Rosa Parks, known as “the mother of the modern Civil Rights Movement,” sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott on December 1, 1955, and changed America.
Below are some links to articles I have written about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that will provide a wide range of background on the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow laws and lynching.
Social media networking and Internet press releases build target audiences and can be combined with email and business cards to create an effective free book publicity and marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing Icons
Building an audience using social media networking, email and business cards may sound like a fantasy, but it can be done and is being done by people who are not trying to sell anything. People who are are simply trying to get a crowd to their next party are using social media networking.
Others using social media networking have hosted occasions recently by inviting their social media network groups to gatherings that turned out to be disasters because so many people showed up at a private residence for a pool party or too many fans showed up at a musical event!
Then why we shouldn’t use social media networking for more serious reasons? Political campaigns do. Medical doctors do. Real estate professionals do. Even people who are looking for jobs use social media networking to find employment. There is no limit, it seems, on how to fashion a social media campaign to suite your needs.
Not that you want to create a riotous environment at your next event, you can still use the basic concept of social media to develop a list of prospective invitees. The purpose of this post is to give you some ideas by sharing with you how I have successfully used social media, email and business cards to plan live or internet events. Authors, musicians and other professionals are using FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and other social media services to sell out their dates and sell their products.
Sunny Nash Signs Her Book
I’m the author of the book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, a memoir about life with my part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement, recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. This book and others I have in progress are a source of material this blog, Sunny Nash - Ethnicity and Culture and my most popular blog, Sunny Nash – Race Relations in America.
Every author needs a book to sign when speaking in public to live audiences or presenting online to virtual communities, who are also anxious to own the author’s signed book. This a good use for social media networking, an opportunity to tie all the pieces together: the book, event promotions, public speaking engagements and book advertising and sales.
In fact, my publisher, Texas A&M University Press, had me sign 1000 copies of my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, when it was first released and then advertised to its perspective audience that signed copies of my book were available for sale. The signed copies sold first.
Audiences want a signature and they will buy the book to get it.
Both online and live target audiences through social media networking can increase book sales on location and on the Internet if you get all the tools working together. In person these gatherings mean immediate business contacts sitting out there listening to you talk about yourself, your profession and your book that they will surely buy. An author is more valuable with that book on the table at the back of the room where you can sit or stand to meet your guests and sign books they purchase.
You know that expression, “Have a book on the table at the back of the room?” Well, it means more credibility as a public speaker and more book sales for an author.
Sunny Nash Signs Her Book
If you are an author, what better opportunity can you have than a chance to invite a group of family, friends, fans, followers and connections to your next book signing and public speaking event? When I first started in this writing business, there were no social media networks from which to build a target audience. In fact, email was still new.
To advertise public speaking engagements and book signing events, the publishing industry and independent authors relied on traditional means of publicity–newspapers, newsletters, radio, television, flyers, posters, mailed invitations and word of mouth–all of which, except word of mouth, could run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Sunny Nash, author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's, Featured in Press-Telegram
When I was new to the book circuit, before my events, in addition to my normal flutters of butterflies in the stomach, I always feared that no one would show up. And I was always wrong. When I drove into the parking lot of an event location and saw all the cars, then I felt comfortable that preparations had not been wasted effort.
Sunny Nash Event Featured in The Los Angeles Times
Many guests will come to your book signing events if they have read about you or your book in the newspaper. I was fortunate to have been featured in several newspapers before events. Newspaper coverage of your book will give your sales and event attendance a boost.
Many newspapers are now online and must be approached differently than they were in the old days, but still they are rich in value. If a reporter writes a feature article about you, that becomes free publicity. However, if you have to take out an advertisement in the newspaper, that will cost serious cash. The same thing is true of radio and television interviews as well. Always go for free book publicity when you can.
Some guests will come to your events because they know you and want to support you. Others will come out of curiosity. Whatever their reasons, welcome them, give them some time, and let them buy your book and become a permanent contact in your database. You never want to speak in public without having your book on the table at the back of the room and a hefty supply of business cards to exchange with members of your audience.
I say business card exchange because having the business cards of your audience in your possession is as important as their having your business card in their possession. The business cards you collect should be placed in your contact database for future reference via email or social media networking to remind the person who you are, where you met and how a relationship can benefit you both.
Beneficial Relationships
Consulting Contracts
Speaking Engagements
Social Media Networks
Employment Opportunities
Don’t take too long to make your contacts with those in your audience, lest they forget about you. Something or someone new is always on the horizon and people’s attention is turned away from you very easily in this age of rapid and constant information. Take the opportunity in an email message to thank them for attending your book event and to extend an invitation to join you in a social media network.
Social media networking is about more than building up a large number of names in your network. Social media networking can become a serious marketing tool. However, you want to be careful about selling to your connections. They will be offended if selling is all you do. Your posts and offers must extend helpful tips, links and information that you would normally share with friends, family and business associates. If you make the social media connection with members of your public speaking audience, be sure to place the new connection in the appropriate group so you can include them in your next event, link or newsletter distribution.
Those business cards you collect at your events are a valuable resource that many people overlook and have begun to discount because of technology. Look into the back of your desk drawer and see how many business cards you have dropped in there and shoved to the back. Those are contacts you failed to make. That failure could have cost you a contract, a book sale or an invitation to speak to a group, depending upon how long the business card has been lying in the drawer.
I developed a little system that helps me to keep my contact database fresh with the business cards I collect. Using inexpensive supplies from an office supply outlet, I have made my business card contacts available for use when I need them. Take a look.
To prepare for a public speaking event of my own, I wrote an internet press release and an article for online distribution and submitted them to a free online publicity service. Being careful to include all the logistical information, I also included information about my book, writing career and other features of the event. Don’t be afraid to talk about your honors and other activities that make you look good. Be sure to mention in your announcements that there will be refreshments. Really, you may ask? The mention of event refreshments in your announcements may sound like a little thing, but food draws an audience, especially the media. Little things count. When I was working for radio, television and newspapers, and I had a choice of events to cover, I chose the events that had food on the front table.
Be careful about the number of links you include in your press release. I usually include my primary blog link and a link to my book page. If you don’t have a book fan page, by all means create one and post a like to your Internet press release about your book event in the status of your fan page, as well as the status of all your social media networks.
Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's by Sunny Nash
At book signing events, I talk about and read from my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, a family memoir about life with my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama, before and during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. When possible, my publisher will arrange for a team tol come to my location and take care of book sales. I like that. It frees me to schmooze with members of the audience.
After I wrote my Internet press release, I knew that would not be enough to get me an audience. Those press releases can reach the entire planet and still not get you a local audience. So, I went into my social media networks and found the contacts in the area where I was appearing and targeted them individually with a note to their page and invited them to my event. Then, I searched my email addresses for names of those in my local and surrounding community whom I thought would be interested in my event. Do not forget those people who may still need to receive an invitation by postal mail.
In an email message to my list of invitees, I placed a link to the Internet press release that announced and described my event. I learned early in the digital media game that attachments are NOT as effective as links. People are reluctant to open attachments for fear of computer infections and attachments are large files, whereas, links are small. Although I still mail out a few invitations to those loyal fans who do not use computer technology. However, email invitations save significantly on postage.
Place email addresses and social media contacts into convenient categories where those in the groups share common interests, conversations and discussions. It simplifies your communications with them. If you have kept in touch with the groups on a frequent basis, they are already familiar with you and your work from your conversations, discussions, blogs and links.
Your target audience is out there awaiting your invitation. Go get them!
“Soul Train” founder and host Don Cornelius is dead from an apparent suicide attempt with a shotgun. He was 75.
His body was found in his Sherman Oaks, CA home on Wednesday morning. This news is very shocking, seeing how today is the first day of Black History Month.
“Soul Train” began in Chicago in 1970 and ran all the way through 2006.
Post-racism America means moving past our history of Jim Crow laws and moving toward a united U.S. race relations.
Jim Crow Sign, United States, 1950s - 1960s
Jim Crow laws comprised a legal system that emerged from black codes during slavery in both the North and the South. This body of law ruled the South and major parts of the North, East, Mid-West and West well into the Twentieth Century, including regions that had never hosted slavery.
Common signs let people know they were not welcome to participate equally in society.
In post-Jim Crow America, Brown v the Board of Education, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Woolworth Sit-ins, the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights Movement, in general, eliminated the physical signs of segregation like the one above. In post-Jim Crow America, we seem anxious to move on. In that need to move on, we must be careful that we are not merely renaming a historical societal ill, an ill that has fundamentally remained unchanged, if not physically, psychologically. One of the largest repositories of historical memorabilia of segregation can be viewed at Ferris State University in the Jim Crow Museum, curated by David Pilgrim. These relics remind us of what Jim Crow did to our nation.
Printed signs are no longer needed to let someone know they cannot go inside. The lack of money does that job. Jim Crow–the gift that just keeps on giving–left his legacy on our nation. We continue to rearrange the pieces of the U.S. race relations puzzle in an effort to make the pieces fit. Although, the advances of some people are apparent, still the pieces of this complex puzzle do not come together in an orderly fashion for most African Americans and Latino Americans, the majority of whom live in segregated neighborhoods and attended segregated schools, as do their offspring, continuing the legacy of racism in post-Jim Crow America.
“We shall overcome,” said Lyndon Johnson, the first sitting U.S. president ever to make such a bold statement on national television. I heard Johnson when he said it and I was shocked along with the rest of the nation–black and white. Now, almost a half century later, I wonder what it will take for race relations in America to truly overcome? The first step a post-Jim Crow America must take is to acknowledge that racism still exists. Then, we must accept the effects of the past Jim Crow legacy, which used primary and secondary public education as a weapon to maintain racial status quo. The examination should include:
Psychological consequences of a nation segregated for centuries
Resulting multi-generational effects of inferior education
Expanding gulf between the races in earning power
Calling a problem by a different name does not change the problem.
When I was growing up in Texas, there were separate schools, not only for African Americans, but also for the children of visiting Mexican laborers who worked in the cotton fields on surrounding former plantations. This was nearly a century after the plantation system had been left to starve for survival after emancipation of the slaves. Remedies for the lack of laborers required creative thinking on the parts of plantation owners and the government committed to their assistance. There were no more slaves and black sharecroppers had left the land seeking better jobs in the cities. What was needed was a fresh pool of cheap, uneducated, controllable labor, which was found just across the border.
California Farm Workers 1940s
In California, similar agricultural needs for workers have existed for decades and still are present today, causing discrimination against the state’s visiting, resident and citizen farm laborers from Mexico.
During the 1940s, many migrant farm workers and their children, moving from one agricultural location to another for jobs, lived in government sponsored camps near California’s numerous agricultural centers. Camp lifestyle most assuredly kept these farm-resident workers segregated from the mainstream California population and kept their children from attending school on a regular basis and receiving an adequate education. For people in this predicament, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech eventually had a tremendous impact.
Racial discrimination was not reserved for black Americans and other Americans of color.
No Irish, Boston 1915
White immigrants, such as the Catholics of Irish and Italian descent, faced discrimination in American cities from Protestant Americans. In many instances, incidents of violence were precipitated by job, business, social and political competition, or just plain intolerance of another’s religious and cultural differences.
Ethnic and racial tensions throughout history in American cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York City have led to violence between Italian, Irish and African Americans and, thus, the assignment of the latest newcomers into a city’s culturally specific enclaves, designated by race, ethnicity, nationality, language or religion of people of the same or similar background or lifestyle. Many American cities are more segregated today than they were 100 years ago, with entire municipalities surrendered to African Americans and surrounded by white suburbs.
One of the primary reasons for white flight after the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled Jim Crow school systems across the nation was public education. Although white parents were willing to surrender their homes, their old neighborhoods and their friends in the city, they were not willing to surrender their children to integrated classrooms. And the situation only got worse after busing students out of their neighborhoods became the method of achieving school racial balance. Remember, these were the same parents who allowed their children to ride a school bus twice as far past black schools to white schools before Brown. So, you see, it wasn’t busing at all that caused the furor. To which schools and neighborhoods the children were being bused caused the loudest political uproar. Supreme court justices have come and gone off the court, others got sick and died. Decades later, the school integration is a situation that is still unsolved to this day.
Historically, cities and school districts used Jim Crow laws to maintain segregation. Today, segregated neighborhoods and schools may have more to do with differences in income levels. In cities like Detroit, residents preserve school status quo by fleeing the city to expensive neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Segregation can be maintained by these economic tactics, which also reduce the tax base for inner-city schools. Deficiencies in inner-city education are followed by chronically low incomes and institutional poverty. In cities with a substantially reduced white student population the public school system is principally made up of black and brown students, a situation that does not address the original hypothesis of integration of an ever-growing population of non-white students into classrooms with the now absent white students.
As long as America can point to certain images in the media that represent upwardly mobile people of color, America can pat herself on the back for racial progress. After all, we have a black president, Barack Obama; the largest grossing Hollywood actor is Samuel L. Jackson, a black man; and named by People Magazine the most beautiful woman in the world, Jennifer Lopez, is brown; all of whom, by the way, would be classified as colored by Jim Crow standards and treated as black. But what about the millions who cannot emerge from the ghetto, inner-city, projects–or whatever name we are calling racial enclaves in these days of post-Jim Crow America?
1900 PA Child Coal Miners
Impoverished immigrant families in the early 1900s lived in homogenous neighborhoods where their children usually attended inferior schools or no school at all. Until these families were able ro move up financially, immigrant children were forced by economics to work in sweat shops, coal mines an other industry to help feed their families.
Until 1938, with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, there were no child-labor laws to protect school-age children from employment exploitation and poor education. Enacted at the end of the Great Depression, the new law set standards for the education of white students, but left in place low educational standards for black, brown and other non-white students.
In early American history and into the twentieth century, the desire and expectation of immigrants was to learn English, educate their children and assimilate into the larger American culture. This dream of assimilation, of course, was not attainable for all who came or were already in the United States. For many African Americans, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans and other immigrants with significant differences from the mainstream, the possibility of assimilation was impossible. Although some individuals, who could, did assimilate into the larger population. And, later, their children ignored racial identification with their ethnic roots. It must be noted that some ethnic groups, historically and currently, have avoided or have not been allowed to assimilate and, thus, retained their own languages and customs.
Leo Frank Lynching Photo
Leo Frank, a Marietta, Georgia, Jewish manufacturing superintendent, whom some say was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a school-aged girl who worked in his factory in 1913, may have been a victim of racism and envy of his success. Frank was dragged from his jail cell in 1915, where he had spent two years appealing his conviction. He was lynched by a mob.
Although Leo Frank is the only documented case of a Jewish person being lynched in American history, it does not mean Frank’s was the only such lynching, and certainly not the only discrimination against the Jewish community. This lack of documentation only means that no other lynching of a Jewish person is on record. Some lynchings, like Frank’s, were conducted to send a message to a community or to retaliate for an invented offense that usually involved a white female or officer of the law.
Anti-Italian Lynching New Orleans 1891
Much earlier than the 1915 Leo Frank lynching, racial tensions in another southern city had already played out violently in one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.
In 1891, the New Orleans anti-Italian lynching involved 11 immigrants accused of involvement in the death of a policeman. Being from Southern Italy, these men had dark skin, making them easy targets for discrimination, on the rise by white supremacy groups after the Civil War. In addition to skin color, the southern Italians’ accents and customs made their assimilation into the larger U.S. population slower and more difficult at first. However, as their numbers grew, language no long a barrier, improved education, increased entry into the professions and more cash, assimilation eventually became possible for this largest single group of Europeans to come to America.
It must be stated that not all white Americans agreed with the practice of Jim Crow, as indicated in the large number of white proponents for the abolition of slavery before the Civil War, education of former slaves through the Justin Morrill Land Grant College Acts, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950-60s. There were towns in the North and South that defied racism by affording its black and brown citizens as many rights and liberties as the laws of the United States recognized for them.
Jim Crow Laws
President Theodore Roosevelt (TR), at least some point in his life, was not one of those people who believed that African Americans deserved equality. Like others of his vintage and economic background, TR was an elitist who also held whites of lesser means in low esteem. TR’s attitude toward class was entirely acceptable during the period of his lifetime.
In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying: “As a race…the [blacks] are altogether inferior to the whites…[and] can never rise to a very high place…I do not believe that the average Negro…is as yet in any way fit to take care of himself and others…If he were…there would be no Negro race problems.” (from In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro [1965], edited by Milton Meltzer.
No Indians or Dogs Allowed by Nicholas Galanin photographs and neon Pratt ...
In my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, I write about Jim Crow laws that affected me and the history of my people, including my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama. The 1891 anti-Italian lynchings in New Orleans occurred when Bigmama was one year old in the neighboring state of Texas, where her own part-Native American and part-African American family was enduring its own brand of racial discrimination.
Bigmama was my mother’s mother. Both women knew Jim Crow laws intimately and had to develop great mothering skills in order to raise their children under the constraints of bigotry and legal oppression. The 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision enacted separate but equal in every aspect of American life–birth in separate hospitals, education in separate schools, riding in separate sections of buses and trains, entering through separate doors and burial in separate cemeteries.
“If your skin was dark, you were classified as colored,” Bigmama said. “Colored was the same as black. And you could not go in the front door, live where you want, work where you want, go to school where you want or marry who you want. It had only a little to do with race. It had everything to do with color, unless you were a white Negro trying to pass as a white person. In that case, you were still black even if your skin was white because everybody knows there is no such thing as a white Negro.”
Bigmama was six years old in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v Ferguson that created the framework to institutionalize racism for generations to come. It must not be forgotten, though, that separate but equal was the first court decision that mentioned equality in racial terms. This ruling, which made plain there existed a difference in the way people of darker skin were served, educated and treated by the government, proved to be a double-edged sword that would cut Jim Crow laws down to size one day.
One edge of the Plessy sword gave the government permission to create two sets of everything, one of which could be of far less quality than the other.
The second edge of the Plessy sword was an actual acknowledgment of inequality that would prove useful in future attacks on Jim Crow through the courts.
Bigmama grew up under Jim Crow law. She was old enough to remember the way life was before the 1896 separate but equal ruling changed her life and left her people–both Native American and African American–without legal recourse for the discrimination that would be heaped upon them by their government for many decades to come.
“How can a neighborhood school be integrated when the neighborhood itself is segregated?” Bigmama asked as she watched the television news in 1967 during the controversial Detroit school desegregation crisis. “That’s the North,” she said. “They should be farther along than they are.”
Bigmama died in 1972, the same year that our town graduated its first fully integrated high school class. That was 18 years after Brown v the Board of Education outlawed segregation in U.S. public schools. But segregation didn’t stop in 1954 with Brown or in 1972 in other parts of the country where courts were still arguing with certain communities that wanted to continue de facto school segregation under the Jim Crow cloak of white flight to suburbs where parents could maintain white neighborhood schools or send their children to private or parochial schools.
A Harvard Study, copyrighted in 2006, shows public schools in some parts of the country to have been more segregated in 2006 than they were in 1991, 15 years before the study. This finding supports the notion of de facto segregation, which often follows residential patterns. Black and brown students, whose families are trapped economically in the inner-city, are most likely to attend segregated public schools, where education funding has dwindled and schools have slipped down on the academic achievement scale.
Although the signs representing segregation have been pulled down and thrown away, and the original laws are erased from the books, all Americans still must be on the watch for the ugly return of discrimination in some other innocent appearing form as we mount a final triumph over post-Jim Crow racism.
In my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, I write about my life with Bigmama during the Civil Rights Movement. The book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as a resource for understanding race relations in America. This distinction and my journalism experience give me the latitude to write with authority about issues of race, ethnicity, culture and civil rights, ranging from slavery to post-blackness, the subject of music journalist Toure’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What it Means to be Black Now, and everything in between.
For more than ten years, I wrote newspaper articles for major dailies that were also syndicated columns about race relations, ethnicity and civil rights history, based on my life, featuring my grandmother. These articles became the basis for my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, which earned me a California Artist Fellowship & Award in 2003. Many of these articles have been referenced and published in other distinguished works.
From the article, UHV Pair’s History Book Wins Carpenter Prize, about the book,Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience, edited by Judith McArthur and Harold Smith, in which I was referenced: “Sunny Nash, a leading author on race relations in the U.S., said she has found the book relevant to discussions in more areas than Texas women’s history. ’I believe previous attempts to recognize the 20th-century contributions of Texas women laid the groundwork of curiosity,” Nash said. “’But it was the actual research by Judith McArthur and Harold Smith that produced ‘Texas Through Women’s Eyes,’ giving us a captivating and sometimes ultra-private glimpse into the lives of these women, and helps us to understand them and ourselves in a deeper way.’”
From my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, in the essay, Cousin Hudge, the Traveling Fiddler:
“Did your father give you the Indian name that Uncle George calls you?” I asked Bigmama, staring at her for a long time, while she decided not to tell me anything more. How well I knew that look.
“We’re going to leave this old talk alone, now.” She seemed to snap back from somewhere far away. “You don’t need to know that old slaverytime prairie business. I didn’t teach it to my children, and I’m not telling you. The old way is gone. Knowing about it can’t help you in this world.”
“But Bigmama.” I knew begging wouldn’t help but I tried anyway.
“Folks are scared of the word, Comanche!” She scolded. “They hate anybody they believe got one drop of that blood. Safer to be African than Comanche!”
I shivered.
“Now let it rest,” she said.
“That’s why you hate it when Uncle George calls you by your other name,” I whispered.
Subsiding into aloofness, she seemed to forget I was even there. Bigmama wouldn’t have been more alone on a mountaintop in the wind. I didn’t mind allowing her to escape. I’d found myself doing the same thing when something annoyed or bored me…
google-site-verification: googlea2c7f7a2683ba7eb.html by Sunny Nash
My mother was a determined mother in the Jim Crow South and, like Rosa Parks, my mother also wrestled with racism.
Littie Nash (1928-2008)
I write about my mother in my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, a memoir about life with my part-Comanche grandmother, Bigmama, during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Bigmama, born in 1890 and died in 1972, witnessed many significant changes in the world. Bigmama taught her children, including my mother her youngest child, how to survive in a hostile homeland, but also be prepared to take advantage of any opportunity for success that came along. And if an opportunity did not come along, make your own opportunity.
My mother, as beautiful as she was smart, took her lead from Bigmama. Both women had a plan for me and made sure they were in control of the plan at all times, although I fought against their process often. Forgive me! I was kid just trying to be a kid. And they were interfering with that. As far as my mother was concerned, everything had a learning purpose. And learning, according to my mother, did not have to be fun. “Read because you want to know something,” she’d say. “Don’t read if you don’t want to know anything.”
What was I to do with that choice? Be dumb?
Determined mothers in the South and the North had to fight Jim Crow to get their children a decent education. Some used the courts. In Trenton, New Jersy, in 1943, two mothers filed suit again a school district that led the New Jersey Supreme Court to abolish Jim Crow schools in that state. The Hedgepeth-Williams lawsuit was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court a decade later in the historic Brown v Board of Education, which dismantled Jim Crow education and outlawed segregation schools throughout the United Stats of America.
I found a great book that I intend to read, Mothering the Race: Women’s Narratives of Reproduction, 1890-1930 (2001) by Allison Berg, professor of English at Michigan State University. Berg’s research focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on African American literature and on issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Amazon’s review says Berg’s book about reproduction explores narratives of both African American and white women. Berg also used the work of feminists and socialists, such as Fannie Barrier Williams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Angela Grimke, and Margaret Sanger to discuss the novels’ social environment and political background. According to the review, “Berg’s point of view is fresh, and her book should interest readers in women’s and feminist American literature.”
Allison Berg
The Choice ADVANCE PRAISE review of Berg’s book says, ”This is a richly contextualized exploration of the politically charged meanings of motherhood in the public sphere. Berg shows very clearly how the experience and representation of maternity were fissured by race and class while also allowing us to understand the historical power of appeals to a notion of universal motherhood.” Rita Felski, author of The Gender of Modernity, says, ”A thoughtful and intelligent contribution to our understanding of the cultural history of motherhood. Berg offers a nuanced account of women’s social and cultural position as inflected by class and race.”
Rosa Parks Arrest
Rosa Parks, considered the mother of the modern Civil Rights Movement, sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, challenging Jim Crow in America by refusing to give up her seat on a public bus in Alabama.
My mother made me aware of Rosa Parks and the growing movement being led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We took newspapers and magazines from all over the nation and I was made to read them. My mother insisted that race relations in America were changing and I was going to be ready when they did. No one fought more rigorously against the consequences of Jim Crow on me than my mother, who demanded excellence from me–speech, grades, attire, behavior, entertainment.
There were certain television shows and movies I was not allowed to see when I was growing up. Early Hollywooddid not fit into my mother’s parenting model. “Why do you need to watch Amos & Andy,” my mother asked. “You have Amos & Andy living down the street.” She was talking about our rather loud-talking neighbors a few blocks away who sometimes drank too much on weekends and stumbled past our house on their way home on Saturday nights. “Amos, Andy and the rest of them are not bad people,” she said. “But I don’t want you acting and talking like them.”
Lena Horne (1917-2010)
My mother took me to the segregated movie theater often to see films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn, my mother’s ideal role model for manners, hair and dress. She told me Lena Horne, another glamorous idol of hers, sang on stage and in movies. But during the 1950s movies starring African Americans, who played classy roles like those played by Horne, sometimes didn’t make it into southern theaters. I only knew of most black entertainers from black newspapers and magazines like Jet, which went into publication in 1951 to fill the void in society and entertainment news about the African American community.
Now, I am glad my mother won the battles she constantly fought with me when I was growing up. What I did not see at the time, I see now. She was right on every level of my upbringing, preparing me for a successful life in a world that may or may not welcome me. Well, welcome or not, here I am! Read the story at Great Mothering in Jim Crow’s World.
Free book publicity and author promotion can be derived at book festivals.
Use your web presence and write regular web content to build a target audience and a list of free book publicity and writing resources to get you invited to book events.
You can easily use my book festival model to establish your credibility on the book festival circuit. Use all of your tools–free book publicity sites, web presence, social media book marketing, blogs, websites and book festivals. Do not be shy about talking yourself up when it comes to proposals for invitations. It is not bragging to say that you and your book have been honored or recognized.
In marketing your book, talk about all of the recognition, honors and reviews your book has achieved. Write press releases about your recognition. Give people who are browsing the web something to find when they key in your name. Establish a free website to advertise your book and to place published reviews, print, Internet and broadcast news coverage, letters from fans and other topics that relate to your book. I am in the process of starting a blog specifically for my book so that I can post the things I just mentioned and to announce the release of my next book, which will benefit from the reputation of my previous book. It is important to link and promote these websites and blogs to get maximum web presence from the work you put into them.
One significant designation my book has acquired is being chosen by the international publishing organization, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. According to its website, “AAUP member presses represent a major force in American intellectual and cultural life. Through their publications, university presses have considerable influence on the direction of scholarly research, the content of higher education, and an impact on policymaking in the United States. Leaders in the world of scholarly publishing, AAUP members make possible the advancement of knowledge and its dissemination to virtually every part of the globe.” This AAUP honor has resulted in my being recognized as a leading author on race relations in America.
Rosa Parks
I have established several blogs, including Sunny Nash – Race Relations in America, where I write on a variety of related topics dealing with the history of U.S. race relations and civil rights.
In this blog, I use my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s, to write on race relations–past and present–giving me the latitude to comment on subjects ranging from slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow in Early Hollywood, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Woolworth Sit-ins and other elements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to education and the modern Tea Party Movement.
In other blogs, I show authors how to use social media and free online book publicity and author promotion to get readers interested in their books, public speaking events and book festivals in which they may be participating. These are tools that you can also employ in your book marketing.
You’ve gone through the process of writing a book.
Now that your book is published, you have to market the book if you want to sell it or get the advantages of being a publshed author. Those advantages include:
Book Sales
Invitations to Book Festivals
Media Interviews
Expert Credibility
Speaking Engagements
Editorial Consulting Contracts
Authors are using all of their marketing tools–free book publicity sites, web presence, web content, social media book marketing and book festivals–and discovering new ones as we speak. Find effective ways that you can sell your book and yourself as an author. And do not forget about television interviews that can be archived on Youtube and other video services.
Internet posts are coming back to haunt those who are not careful about the sensitivity of the information they share. And remember information is not knowledge.
Doris Topsy-Elvord, the first black woman elected to the Long Beach, California, City Council; the first black female vice mayor of Long Beach; the first African American and third female on the Long Beach Harbor Commission; is one of the Long Beach legends featured in the book, BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way.
Co-founder of the African American Heritage Society, Long Beach, with Indira Hale Tucker, Topsy-Elvord provides a primary account of her life and times along with the accounts eleven other Long Beach legends in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way. Other Long Beach legends in the book are: Wilma Powell, Vera Mulkey, Carrie Bryant, Alta Cooke, Bobbie Smith, Patricia Lofland, Evelyn Knight, Dale Clinton, Maycie Herrington, Autrilla Scott and the late Lillie Mae Wesley, each of whom made a difference in the history of Long Beach, California, and development of race relations in that city.
The Writing Life is my lifestyle, allowing me to seek out those topics that interest me and also bring healthy social discussion to the table. I welcome healthy discussion because it raises and reveals new perspectives on old issues. When I examine issues of the past, I learn where I stand in the present and how I will be affected in the future. In all of my re-examination of past social issues, I benefit, in that, I am able to understand at a deeper level how to explain the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the effect of Jim Crow on American society without preaching and turning readers away before I am able to reach them.
Reaching people is my goal in this blog, The Writing Life. However, in addition to reaching people, my blogs, online articles and Internet press releases serve another function. These online publications become part of my overall web presence and help in book marketing by attracting attention of search engines, as well as readers interested in my subjects. Web presence created by online publication gives me brand equity and popular recognition, while I am helping others to do the same with their writing.
Alta Cooke, Press-Telegram
You don’t have to look very far to find interesting subjects for your books and other writing projects. Carolyn Smith Watts and I found a project that has had significant historical implications in the area of race relations in our BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way book and DVD.
Because several of the women in this book are from Texas, the Brazos Valley African American Museum in Bryan, Texas, has requested that the book be placed on display there. Members of the Pioneering Dozen who are from Texas are: Carrie Bryant, from Mexia; Vera Mulkey, from Austin; Wilma Powell, from Waco; and the late Lillie Mae Westley, from Texarkana. These Texas women migrated to Long Beach, California, as small children with their parents or as young women. All have made Long Beach their home and made historical contributions to the city.
Brazos Valley African American Museum
Historical Society Long Beach
When selecting a writing project like this one, make sure you involve credible personalities who will be supported by the general public, specific target audiences and the media.
BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way received much local Long Beach attention in that it was installed into the Historical Society, Long Beach, had events covered by local media and was later received by libraries and museums across the nation, like the Brazos Valley African American Museum and the Historical Society, Long Beach.
Rosa Parks on Montgomery Bus
In their own way, the African American women in BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way had a similar mission in their lives as Rosa Parks when she sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.
There were many forces at work across the nation during the Civil Rights Movement. For in-depth understanding about the social and political impact of Rosa Parks and her initiation of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the involvement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., please read: Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott & Jim Crow .
Topsy-Elvord and other women legends of Southern California before and during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s shattered racial tradition in Long Beach in the same way as Rosa Parks shattered Jim Crow in the Deep South. The Southern California movement did not garner national media attention because their actions were not in the Deep Jim Crow South, where civil rights action was concentrated. The concentration in the Jim Crow south and not Jim Crow California was because the laws regarding race in the Jim Crow south were so blatantly written that challenging them presented a clearer path to victory over U.S. racial segregation for Thurgood Marshall and the team of lawyers in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
However, the efforts of these courageous women like Doris Topsy Elvord and others changed Long Beach and the rest of California. For a more complete look at the story of Doris Topsy-Elvord and the other living legends of Long Beach read: Race Relations in America and Southern California – Twelve African American women, featured in historical profiles, BREAKING THROUGH Lighting the Way, made a difference in the history of race relations in Long Beach, California, the same way Rosa Parks changed the Jim Crow South.
Long Beach, California, Legends
(left-right, rear) Evelyn Knight, Patricia Lofland, Bobbie Smith, Alta Cooke, Carrie Bryant, Vera Mulkey, Wilma Powell, and Doris Topsy-Elvord; (seated left-right) Autrilla Scott, Maycie Herrington, Dale Clinton and Lillie Mae Wesley (not present)
Race Relations in America and Southern California includes text, photographs and videos covering race and civil rights issues such as the Supreme Court rulings in Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. the Board of Education, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the history of Jim Crow laws, black codes, segregation in Hollywood films and entertainment, reverse discrimination in education and lynching in the Deep South.
Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's by Sunny Nash
Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press), chosen by the Association of American University Presses as one of its essential books for understanding race relations in the United States. The award-winning author is listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center in New York and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida.
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, affected race relations in America and early Hollywood, in that, studios had to change with the new racial climate that had relegated black actors to servants’ roles and mirrored pre-civil rights America.
Rosa Parks started the Montgomery Bus Boycott to free Alabama citizens of segregated bus seating and to show the nation how to overcome the tragedy that slavery left behind. Angela Bassett becomes Rosa Parks in her portrayal of the legendary civil rights heroine.
A free library service distributed upon request to Texans of all ages with disabilities who are registered to receive Talking Books, Spotlight on Texas is a biannual audio publication announcing the latest audio books produced by the Texas Talking Book Program at the Volunteer Recording Studio in Austin and the Recording Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Midland, Texas.
First, we are Texans; second, we are women; we were both involved in Texas politics at one time; and fourth, books by or about us have been declared classics by the Texas Talking Book series of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and included in the latest edition of Spotlight on exas.
The audio version of Thorny Rose of Texas: an Intimate Portrait of Governor Ann Richards (Carol Publishing Corporation)by Mike Shropshire and Frank Schaeffer is a biography of the sharp-tongued woman who stepped onto the national stage at the 1988 Democratic National Convention as keynote speaker and said of then Candidate George Herbert Walker Bush, “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
I knew from the beginning that I liked Ann, not because of what she said about Mr. Bush because I liked him, too. I liked her because she said what we were thinking and thought ourselves too polite to say aloud. What she did in the end to lose the governor’s race to George W. Bush was to treat his candidacy against her without fear. She let some people around her convince her that she was so popular in Texas that she would crush him. But what she didn’t realize about him that the world has since learned is that he didn’t let people get away with insulting his father.
Born in poverty during the Great Depression, Richards attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she became a star debater. Thorny Roseof Texas: an Intimate Portrait of Governor Ann Richards covers the personal, professional and political life of the legend who is Ann Richards, elected Governor of Texas in 1990 and defeated in 1994 by George W. Bush, son of the subject of her 1988 keynote speech. Ann Richards was the second female governor of Texas. The first was Miriam Ferguson, elected in 1924. Dorothy Ann Willis Richards, born in 1933, died in 2006.
Since 1978, Talking Book volunteers such as Linda Fox, who narrated Thorny Rose of Texas: an Intimate Portrait of Governor Ann Richardsas well as Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s by Sunny Nash, have recorded thousands of books, both fiction and nonfiction by Texas authors or about Texas history, culture and people. The program also loans users of the services playback equipment needed to listen to recorded books and magazines.
My grandmother, Bigmama, didn’t shop at Woolworth’s because black shoppers and other shoppers of color were not welcome in many stores on the Main Streets of towns like Bryan, Texas in the 1950s and 1960s. “I know this to be true because I was there during the pre-civil rights era. I write about that time in my book, Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’s (Texas A&M University Press). Bigmama and my family taught me to rise above it and do the best I could at whatever it was I was trying to do.
Nash’s memoir of growing up in the 1950s in the Jim Crow South goes beyond descriptions of segregation and hardships, but illustrates the love and warmth of her family and community and the faith they had in her to later attend Texas A&M University and attain professional heights none before her had achieved.
Working with the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped in Washington, DC, a program administered by the Library of Congress, the Talking Book Program provides free library services and audio books like Bigmama Didn’t Shop At Woolworth’sto more than 20,000 Texans per year who are unable to read printed books. Through individual services or institutions such as schools, nursing homes or hospitals, the Talking Book Program serves those with permanent or temporary visual, physical and learning impairments or disabilities that prevent them from reading standard printed books and magazines.
, and everything in between.
(2001) by Allison Berg, professor of English at Michigan State University. Berg’s research focuses on twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on African American literature and on issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
