Charles R. Johnson Bücher

A fearless work of historical fiction that digs deep into the life of one of history's best-known figures of the Civil Rights Movement

Buddhism-influenced essays, stories, and reviews by National Book Award winner Charles R. Johnson.     This wide and varied collection of essays, reviews, and short stories by the renowned author Charles Johnson offers incisive views on poltics, race, and Buddhism. Johnson notes that in his life the two activities that have anchored him and reinforce each other are creative production and spiritual practice. This book is a crystallization of what he has learned during his passage through American literature, the visual arts, and the Buddhadharma.     Essays    • "And if Peace Is Their Goal . . ." on the principles of enlightened politics   • "The King We Need" on the deep and sophisticated moral philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and why King's teachings and example are important to all Americans   • "Why Buddhists Should Vote"--Johnson posits that voting can be seen as a way to reduce suffering   • "The Meaning of Barack Obama"--an appreciation of the man who became one of the most historic US presidents, even before his first 100 days were through   • "Why Buddhism for Black America Now?"--what Buddhism can offer the African-American community in the post-MLK era

Years before he wrote his National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage , Charles Johnson created these sidesplitting and subversive gag comics about Black life in America, now collected for the first time in nearly half a century.Before Charles Johnson found fame as a novelist and won the National Book Award for Middle Passage in 1991, he was a cartoonist, and a very good one. Taught via correspondence course by the comics editor Lawrence Lariar, mentored by the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti, and inspired by the call of the poet Amiri Baraka to celebrate and depict Black life in America, Johnson crafted some of the fiercest and funniest cartoons of the twentieth century.Reimagining the gag comic as a powerful and incendiary tool, Johnson tackled America’s mid-century afflictions—segregation, inner-city poverty, police brutality, and white supremacy—by craftily subverting stale gag tropes. He populated them with bullet-dodging Black Panthers, doubt-filled Klansmen, militant babies, selfserving politicians, and complacent suburban liberals.This collection, Johnson’s first in nearly fifty years, brings together work from across his college newspaper gags, selections from his books Black Humor and Half-Past Nation Time , his unpublished manuscript Lumps in the Melting Pot , and uncollected pieces. Taken together, this volume reveals Johnson as long overdue for appreciation as a cartoonist of the first order.

A freed slave escapes his bad debts in New Orleans by stowing away on a slave ship en route to Africa.