February 2008 Archives

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby is a tour de force among graphic novels, regarded by many comics scholars and aficionados as an instant classic. The story follows Toland Polk, a young white man growing up and coming to terms with his homosexuality in southern Alabama during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Along the way we meet his friends and family and other members of the town where he was born, each with their own story to tell.

Cruse’s storytelling is sure and restrained, and Toland’s journey is neither caricature nor pity party: he’s a young man with flaws, and you get to see him at his best and his worst. Cruse’s art is a fine example of mature draftsmanship -- reminiscent of R. Crumb’s crosshatching or Thomas Ott’s finely detailed scratchboard style. At the same time, the characters have a rounded, cartoonish quality that’s both amusing and disturbing, which in some way softens the blow when Toland witnesses horrible events, from beatings to knifings to lynchings.

Gay Liberation and the struggle for LGBT rights runs parallel in many respects to the history of the struggle for civil rights for people of all races. Cruse shows this in many ways, from the direct parallels between all the unrest of the 1960s and the gay rights struggles that followed directly on their heels. It's impossible to say when and how gay rights might have developed with the Civil Rights Movement, but as it is, the one owes a great debt to the examples of passion and pride set by the great black leaders of the 1960s, from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X.

Cabell Library PN6727.C74 S86 1995

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Lillian M. Redd, Library Specialist I

Two hundred and fifty years of internal combustion miasma. Two hundred and fifty years of ingrained forced acceptance of a life of hard labor, broken family ties, lost identity and servitude. Four million enslaved people. Generations upon hopeless generations grievously passing on a culture that flaunted their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

During the Great Depression (1936-1938), the federal government decided to record the remembrances of these older former slaves. As part of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), this project became the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives, of which this title depicts the lives of those persons living on plantations in South Carolina.

Before Freedom... is about real people; not just numbers, not just statistics, but true-to-life stories that give us a peek into their everyday lives. Here are day-to-day occurrences and descriptions; some written in dialect, others interpreted by the federal worker to provide clarity.

It’s all here:

Sunrise to sunset labor
Branding of slaves by judiciously tacking on the owner’s surname as their own
Acceptance of physical abuse
Abomination of family separations
Hint of wide-spread slave breeding

Yet, for all those generations who endured the destruction and corruption that was placed upon them, we see a people who were inventive and creative. Their hard scrabble lives showcased their ingenuity while belying a system that was not theirs for gain.

Cabell Library E445.S7 B44 1989

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by David Folmar, CLUAC Member

The book is a subversive statement in itself, masquerading as a book of graphics about the last great age of illustrated movie posters. It is really an examination of the so-called “Blaxploitation” movies of the 70’s and what they meant to the community of filmmakers then and now. The poster art is beautiful in a way that modern poster art for movies is not. It is heroic and informative and showcases the best of the illustrator's art of the period. The book, however, is so much more. It is a collection of interviews with the artists who made the black movies of 70 and the artwork that helped define them.

The interviewees include stars of the period like Pam Grier, Rudy Ray Moore and Isaac Hayes as well as movie makers like modern creative forces Ice-T, Samuel L. Jackson and Quentin Tarantino. They educate they reader about how the black movies of the 70’s were both a breakthrough for the black community and a chance for black actors to get work that let them star inside the Hollywood system. They hold that, far from being simply exploitative of the black community, they were part of a film movement that helped a lagging Hollywood system and proved a breakthrough for the black actors of today like Will Smith and Denzel Washington. The movies themselves also gave voice to a community that previously had no voice, and myths to a people who lacked heroes that were not just imitations of established, white-accepted roles for the black community.

Cabell Library PN1995.9.N4 M32 1998

Celebrating Black History Month at the VCU Libraries

Reviewed by Patricia Selinger, Head of Preservation

It was a tense moment. Sojourner Truth was about to speak at the second Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. Truth had been making many Americans uncomfortable as she spoke publicly of the hypocrisy of democracy when racism and sexism were tearing the country apart. Her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, was published the year before and she had joined an abolitionist speakers bureau. Her supporters secured her a place on the program. As soon as she spoke, ongoing discussions halted. The elegant, privileged white feminist women at the meeting, who thought they could speak authentically for slave women, were quiet. Truth’s life stood in stark contrast to theirs, and she spoke much more persuasively than they could. She called on women who did not want her to speak or join the discussions to face their hypocrisy. She denounced men in the audience for withholding rights from their mothers, sisters, and wives. The question, “Ar’n’t I A Woman” perfectly captured the difference between black and white antebellum women.

Deborah White, a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, wrote a concise book on the development of stereotypes of slave women as well the horrors they were forced to face in their daily life. She describes well the issues and differences between slave and free women. While all women of the time were powerless and exploited to a degree, black women experienced an extreme form of persecution. Extensive footnotes authenticate her research and work. White proposed that the female slave trade had little to do with the woman’s ability to work; instead, it had everything to do with physical attractiveness and the black woman’s ability to have children -- children to benefit the slave owner alone. In essence, slave women were little more than sexual objects. White persuasively documents how the stigma persists to modern times. Black women have no era in history where they were respected or held privilege as a class in American society.

Nine years later Sojourner Truth was speaking again, this time on the abolition of slavery. Rumors circulated in the audience that Truth was actually a man posing as a woman. Men demanded that she show her breasts to prove she was a woman. She did, saying that it was to their shame that she did so. At that time, “No” seemed to be the answer to the question “Ar’n’t I A Woman”. White argues that the black woman is still waiting for an affirmative answer.

The text of the speech “Ar’n’t [Ain’t] I A Woman?” can be found online at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth-woman.html. The book was White’s first publication and won the Letitia Brown Memorial Book Prize.

Cabell Library E 443 .W58 1985