America I AM: Legends by Tavis Smiley

Author:Tavis Smiley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2009-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Alex Haley (1921–1992): Born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley was a prominent journalist and novelist whose work set a new standard for excellence in American letters. Haley joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939, where he spent two decades on active duty. It was in the Coast Guard that Haley discovered his passion for writing, spending the last ten years of his service as a military journalist.

After leaving the service in 1959, Haley began writing articles and features for many of the leading popular magazines. His first interview, appearing in the September 1962 issue of Playboy magazine, was with jazz artist Miles Davis. After interviewing Malcolm X for Playboy in 1965, he collaborated on The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (1965), which became an instant bestseller. Time magazine later named it “one of the top 10 most important nonfiction works of the 20th century.”

Shortly after completing Malcolm’s story, he plunged into researching the story of Kunta Kinte, an eighteenth-century slave whom Haley claimed as an ancestor. In 1976, after nearly a decade of research, he released his historical novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The book garnered special citations from the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Board, and was translated into a successful hit TV miniseries of the same name in 1977, drawing almost 130 million viewers. In 1979, Haley repeated the formula with Roots: The Next Generation, and another television miniseries, Queen (1993), based on research into his grandmother’s mixed-race heritage.

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977): Born in Ruleville, Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer was a heroic grassroots civil rights leader, organizing Blacks throughout the rural South during the bloody Mississippi “Freedom Summer.” The youngest of twenty children and the granddaughter of slaves, she was forced to leave school at age twelve to find work to help support her family. While working as a plantation timekeeper, her interest in the civil rights struggle led her to attend meetings of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, an early civil rights organization.

In 1961, Hamer was sterilized without her consent by a White doctor as part of Mississippi’s scheme to reduce the population of poor Blacks. As she traveled throughout the state in the summer of 1962 to rally people to vote, she was notified that she was fired from her plantation job and received threats from the police and the Ku Klux Klan. On another trip into the Farm Belt, outside of Winona, Mississippi, Hamer and members of her group were arrested and brutally beaten. Though she needed more than a month to recover, the ordeal only spurred her on to further action.

In 1964, to protest the all-White presidential delegation sent to the Democratic National Convention, Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As its vice-chair, she gave a rousing, nationally televised speech that outlined the case for equal voting rights. Though the MFDP was not seated that year, their actions guaranteed integrated delegations in future national conventions. Hamer went on to represent the Mississippi delegation in the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.