In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town's growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn't enough. The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America. But they would wait until after the presidential election, so that their actions wouldn't hurt Donald Trump's chances of winning. An FBI informant befriended the three men, acting as law enforcement's eyes and ears for eight months. His secretly taped conversations with the militia were pivotal in obstructing their plans and were a lynchpin in the resulting trial and convictions for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
|
9780358359906
|
Hardcover
Julian Bond's Time to Teach
By Bond, Julian
Horace "Julian" Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) . For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the civil rights movement.Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists, some very young, who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780807033203
|
Hardcover
Unforgetting
By Lovato, Roberto
"Gripping and beautiful. With the artistry of a poet and the intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States." - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes and Nickel and DimedAn urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Robert Lovato's memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
Harper
|
9780062938473
|
Hardcover
No Property in Man
By Wilentz, Sean
A radical reconstruction of the founders' debate over slavery and the Constitution, by the best-selling, award-winning author of The Rise of American Democracy.Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation.
Harvard University Press
|
9780674972223
|
Hardcover
Life of a Klansman
By Ball, Edward
Named a best book of the summer by Literary Hub
The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award-winner Edward Ball
Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his familys anti-Black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.
Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A White French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: Massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages - all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-White view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by "our Klansman" and his comrades, and shares their stories.
For Whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that 50 percent of Whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of White Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished.
In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Balls family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.
An NPR Best Book of the Year - 2020
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year - 2020
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Read more REVIEW
"Taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, [Edward Ball] engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mothers side. The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today." -- Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
"[Life of a Klansman] is brave, revealing and intimate, as well as an exploration of how one familys morally complicated past echoes down to the present. This is a story for our cultural moment, as Americans begin to engage with and acknowledge the ways that white supremacy endures in our society . . . Ball is movingly philosophical about what responsibility his generation holds for the sins of its fathers." -- W. Ralph Eubanks, The Wall Street Journal
"Balls use of the historical present not only illuminates a Klansmans thinking but lends an immediacy to the writing . . . Ball writes with great sensitivity about the black victims of appalling atrocities such as the massacre in New Orleans on July 30, 1866 . . . Balls writing is suffused with a generosity of spirit; it has an unusually clear-eyed and quiet quality that often defies the tumult that it is depicting. His humility is palpable as he searches for and interviews descendants of some of those injured or killed in the atrocities that Constant likely took part in." -- Colin Grant, The New York Review of Books
"Ball tells his story with curiosity, disgust, and a sweeping lamp of novelistic imagination, making his tale all the chillier for being so intimate, so intensely realized . . . This is an important work of Americas collective history -- one whose ghosts are most undead." -- John Freeman, Literary Hub
"In writing a microhistory about [his great-great-grandfather], [Ball] builds a psychological portrait of white supremacy, which then radiates outward and across time, to explain the motives and historical background behind racist violence . . . Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past." -- Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
"Captivating . . . An intimate origin story of the white-supremacist movement . . . [Edward Ball] reconstructs his ancestors world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness . . . Ball refuses to disown the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us. Accordingly, he approaches his ancestors story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination." -- Julian Lucas, Harpers
"Edward Balls Life of a Klansman is filled with life stories that could have come from William Faulkners pen." -- Nathan M. Greenfield, Times Literary Supplement
"Balls direct but nimble prose cuts the contours of Constant Lecorgnes life and grapples simultaneously with the coherent outline and structure that whiteness imposes . . . Though he claims Life of a Klansman is an investigation of his matrilineal ancestor, Ball has engineered another kind of coup: a public reckoning with white supremacy . . . Balls book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; its looking both directions at once." -- Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe
"In [our] severe but potentially transformative times, Life of a Klansman implicitly asks how White Americans can meaningfully confront their relationship to enduring white supremacy, whether they are directly tied to enslavers or terrorists, as Ball is, or l
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374186326
|
Audiobook
Black Water
By Robertson, David A.
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Book of the Year A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year A Maclean's 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter"An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love." - Cherie DimalineIn this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new futureThe son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas - or Don, as he became known - lived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldn't speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret.
Harper Perennial
|
9781443457781
|
Paperback
Too Much and Never Enough
By Ph.d., Mary L. Trump
In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald's only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world's health, economic security, and social fabric.Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents' large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr.
Simon & Schuster
|
9781982141462
|
Hardcover
Prisoner
By Rezaian, Jason
"An important story. Harrowing, and suspenseful, yes - but it's also a deep dive into a complex and egregiously misunderstood country with two very different faces. There is no better time to know more about Iran - and Jason Rezaian has seen both of those faces." - Anthony BourdainThe dramatic memoir of the journalist who was held hostage in a high-security prison in Tehran for eighteen months and whose release - which almost didn't happen - became a part of the Iran nuclear dealIn July 2014, Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested by Iranian police, accused of spying for America. The charges were absurd. Rezaian's reporting was a mix of human interest stories and political analysis. He had even served as a guide for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown. Initially, Rezaian thought the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding, but soon realized that it was much more dire as it became an eighteen-month prison stint with impossibly high diplomatic stakes. While in prison, Rezaian had tireless advocates working on his behalf. His brother lobbied political heavyweights including John Kerry and Barack Obama and started a social media campaign - #FreeJason - while Jason's wife navigated the red tape of the Iranian security apparatus, all while the courts used Rezaian as a bargaining chip in negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.In Prisoner, Rezaian writes of his exhausting interrogations and farcical trial. He also reflects on his idyllic childhood in Northern California and his bond with his Iranian father, a rug merchant; how his teacher Christopher Hitchens inspired him to pursue journalism; and his life-changing decision to move to Tehran, where his career took off and he met his wife. Written with wit, humor, and grace, Prisoner brings to life a fascinating, maddening culture in all its complexity."Jason paid a deep price in defense of journalism and his story proves that not everyone who defends freedom carries a gun, some carry a pen." - John F. Kerry, 68th Secretary of State
Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
|
9780062691576
|
Hardcover
Making All Black Lives Matter
By Ransby, Barbara
The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change.
University of California Press
|
9780520292703
|
Hardcover
This Is the Fire
By Lemon, Don
The host of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon is more popular than ever. As America's only Black prime-time anchor, Lemon and his daily monologues on racism and antiracism, on the failures of the Trump administration and of so many of our leaders, and on America's systemic flaws speak for his millions of fans. Now, in an urgent, deeply personal, riveting plea, he shows us all how deep our problems lie, and what we can do to begin to fix them.Beginning with a letter to one of his Black nephews, he proceeds with reporting and reflections on his slave ancestors, his upbringing in the shadows of segregation, and his adult confrontations with politicians, activists, and scholars. In doing so, Lemon offers a searing and poetic ultimatum to America. He visits the slave port where a direct ancestor was shackled and shipped to America.
White Hot Hate
By Lehr, Dick
In the spring of 2016, as immigration debates rocked the United States, three men in a militia group known as the Crusaders grew aggravated over one Kansas town's growing Somali community. They decided that complaining about their new neighbors and threatening them directly wasn't enough. The men plotted to bomb a mosque, aiming to kill hundreds and inspire other attacks against Muslims in America. But they would wait until after the presidential election, so that their actions wouldn't hurt Donald Trump's chances of winning. An FBI informant befriended the three men, acting as law enforcement's eyes and ears for eight months. His secretly taped conversations with the militia were pivotal in obstructing their plans and were a lynchpin in the resulting trial and convictions for conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Julian Bond's Time to Teach
By Bond, Julian
Horace "Julian" Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) . For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the civil rights movement.Compiled from his original lecture notes, Julian Bond's Time to Teach brings his invaluable teachings to a new generation of readers and provides a necessary toolkit for today's activists in the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Bond sought to dismantle the perception of the civil rights movement as a peaceful and respectable protest that quickly garnered widespread support. Through his lectures, Bond detailed the ground-shaking disruption the movement caused, its immense unpopularity at the time, and the bravery of activists, some very young, who chose to disturb order to pursue justice.
Unforgetting
By Lovato, Roberto
"Gripping and beautiful. With the artistry of a poet and the intensity of a revolutionary, Lovato untangles the tightly knit skein of love and terror that connects El Salvador and the United States." - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes and Nickel and DimedAn urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Robert Lovato's memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.
No Property in Man
By Wilentz, Sean
A radical reconstruction of the founders' debate over slavery and the Constitution, by the best-selling, award-winning author of The Rise of American Democracy.Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation.
Life of a Klansman
By Ball, Edward
Named a best book of the summer by Literary Hub The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award-winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his familys anti-Black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A White French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: Massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages - all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-White view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by "our Klansman" and his comrades, and shares their stories. For Whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that 50 percent of Whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of White Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished. In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Balls family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror. An NPR Best Book of the Year - 2020 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year - 2020 A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. Read more REVIEW "Taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, [Edward Ball] engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mothers side. The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today." -- Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "[Life of a Klansman] is brave, revealing and intimate, as well as an exploration of how one familys morally complicated past echoes down to the present. This is a story for our cultural moment, as Americans begin to engage with and acknowledge the ways that white supremacy endures in our society . . . Ball is movingly philosophical about what responsibility his generation holds for the sins of its fathers." -- W. Ralph Eubanks, The Wall Street Journal "Balls use of the historical present not only illuminates a Klansmans thinking but lends an immediacy to the writing . . . Ball writes with great sensitivity about the black victims of appalling atrocities such as the massacre in New Orleans on July 30, 1866 . . . Balls writing is suffused with a generosity of spirit; it has an unusually clear-eyed and quiet quality that often defies the tumult that it is depicting. His humility is palpable as he searches for and interviews descendants of some of those injured or killed in the atrocities that Constant likely took part in." -- Colin Grant, The New York Review of Books "Ball tells his story with curiosity, disgust, and a sweeping lamp of novelistic imagination, making his tale all the chillier for being so intimate, so intensely realized . . . This is an important work of Americas collective history -- one whose ghosts are most undead." -- John Freeman, Literary Hub "In writing a microhistory about [his great-great-grandfather], [Ball] builds a psychological portrait of white supremacy, which then radiates outward and across time, to explain the motives and historical background behind racist violence . . . Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past." -- Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic "Captivating . . . An intimate origin story of the white-supremacist movement . . . [Edward Ball] reconstructs his ancestors world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness . . . Ball refuses to disown the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us. Accordingly, he approaches his ancestors story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination." -- Julian Lucas, Harpers "Edward Balls Life of a Klansman is filled with life stories that could have come from William Faulkners pen." -- Nathan M. Greenfield, Times Literary Supplement "Balls direct but nimble prose cuts the contours of Constant Lecorgnes life and grapples simultaneously with the coherent outline and structure that whiteness imposes . . . Though he claims Life of a Klansman is an investigation of his matrilineal ancestor, Ball has engineered another kind of coup: a public reckoning with white supremacy . . . Balls book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; its looking both directions at once." -- Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe "In [our] severe but potentially transformative times, Life of a Klansman implicitly asks how White Americans can meaningfully confront their relationship to enduring white supremacy, whether they are directly tied to enslavers or terrorists, as Ball is, or l
Black Water
By Robertson, David A.
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Book of the Year A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year A Maclean's 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter"An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love." - Cherie DimalineIn this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new futureThe son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas - or Don, as he became known - lived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldn't speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret.
Too Much and Never Enough
By Ph.d., Mary L. Trump
In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald's only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world's health, economic security, and social fabric.Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents' large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr.
Prisoner
By Rezaian, Jason
"An important story. Harrowing, and suspenseful, yes - but it's also a deep dive into a complex and egregiously misunderstood country with two very different faces. There is no better time to know more about Iran - and Jason Rezaian has seen both of those faces." - Anthony BourdainThe dramatic memoir of the journalist who was held hostage in a high-security prison in Tehran for eighteen months and whose release - which almost didn't happen - became a part of the Iran nuclear dealIn July 2014, Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested by Iranian police, accused of spying for America. The charges were absurd. Rezaian's reporting was a mix of human interest stories and political analysis. He had even served as a guide for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown. Initially, Rezaian thought the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding, but soon realized that it was much more dire as it became an eighteen-month prison stint with impossibly high diplomatic stakes. While in prison, Rezaian had tireless advocates working on his behalf. His brother lobbied political heavyweights including John Kerry and Barack Obama and started a social media campaign - #FreeJason - while Jason's wife navigated the red tape of the Iranian security apparatus, all while the courts used Rezaian as a bargaining chip in negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal.In Prisoner, Rezaian writes of his exhausting interrogations and farcical trial. He also reflects on his idyllic childhood in Northern California and his bond with his Iranian father, a rug merchant; how his teacher Christopher Hitchens inspired him to pursue journalism; and his life-changing decision to move to Tehran, where his career took off and he met his wife. Written with wit, humor, and grace, Prisoner brings to life a fascinating, maddening culture in all its complexity."Jason paid a deep price in defense of journalism and his story proves that not everyone who defends freedom carries a gun, some carry a pen." - John F. Kerry, 68th Secretary of State
Making All Black Lives Matter
By Ransby, Barbara
The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change.
This Is the Fire
By Lemon, Don
The host of CNN Tonight with Don Lemon is more popular than ever. As America's only Black prime-time anchor, Lemon and his daily monologues on racism and antiracism, on the failures of the Trump administration and of so many of our leaders, and on America's systemic flaws speak for his millions of fans. Now, in an urgent, deeply personal, riveting plea, he shows us all how deep our problems lie, and what we can do to begin to fix them.Beginning with a letter to one of his Black nephews, he proceeds with reporting and reflections on his slave ancestors, his upbringing in the shadows of segregation, and his adult confrontations with politicians, activists, and scholars. In doing so, Lemon offers a searing and poetic ultimatum to America. He visits the slave port where a direct ancestor was shackled and shipped to America.