Tag Archives: Black History

The University of Wisconsin Press celebrates Black History Month

The University of Wisconsin Press is proud to publish books and journals that engage with Black history, culture, and experiences. In celebration of Black History Month, the following titles will be offered at a discount all month long, with discount code BHM2024UWISC. We invite you to click on the hyperlinks below to browse our titles across genres, from narratives by enslaved Americans to works of anthropology, from history to poetry and fiction. You can also follow along on social media as we highlight some of the must-read books included here. 

How the End First Showed by D. M. Aderibigbe

Words of Witness: Black Womens Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards

Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic by Houston A. Baker Jr.

The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, and Piper Kendrix Williams

The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave by Henry Bibb, with a new introduction by Charles J. Heglar

The Blind African Slave: Or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace by Jeffrey Brace, as told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq., edited and with an introduction by Kari J. Winter

Grace Engine by Joshua Burton

Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham edited  by VèVè A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson

Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America by Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia C. Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern

Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association by E. David Cronon, foreword by John Hope Franklin

The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census by Philip D. Curtin

Livin the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet by Frank Marshall Davis, edited and with an introduction by John Edgar Tidwell

Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz

Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States by Carl Degler

Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print edited by Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne

Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood by Mark S. Fleisher

Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives by Frances Smith Foster

Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy and Daisy and Violet Hilton edited by Linda Frost

Transforming Ethnographic Knowledge edited by Rebecca Hardin and Kamari Maxine Clarke

Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991 by Christine Hatzky

Race in America: The Struggle for Equality edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones Jr.

Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law by Herbert Hill

Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories by Jean M. Humez

Practical Audacity: Black Women and International Human Rights by Stanlie James

Understanding and Teaching American Slavery edited by Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, foreword by Ira Berlin

Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement edited by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Last Seen by Jacqueline Jones LaMon

Reading African American Autobiography: Twenty-First-Century Contexts and Criticism edited by Eric D. Lamore

Gender Nonconformity, Race, and Sexuality: Charting the Connections edited by Toni Lester

Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africas First Olympians by Bernth Lindfors

Equals in Learning and Piety: Muslim Women Scholars in Nigeria and North America by Beverly Mack

Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 18791911 edited by Mary Maillard

Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 by Joseph C. Miller

Meet Me Halfway by Jennifer Morales

Fagen: An African American Renegade in the Philippine-American War by Michael Morey

For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics by Bruce L. Mouser

A Black Gambler’s World of Liquor, Vice, and Presidential Politics: William Thomas Scott of Illinois, 1839–1917 by Bruce L. Mouser

Òrìṣà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture by Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey

All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color edited by Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer

A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball by Jerry Poling

Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation by Sandra Pouchet Paquet

After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South by Hortense Powdermaker, with a new introduction by Brackette P. Williams and Drexel Woodson

Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature by Patrice D. Rankine

A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina by Reverend Mrs. Charlotte S. Riley, edited and with an introduction by Crystal J. Lucky, foreword by Joycelyn K. Moody

Fugitive Texts: Slave Narratives in Antebellum Print Culture, by Michaël Roy, translated by Susan Pickford

A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said by Omar Ibn Said, translated by Ala Alryyes

When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures by Sheila Smith McKoy

Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South by Michael Tadman

Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture by William L. Van Deburg

Sister: An African American Life in Search of Justice by Sylvia Bell White and Jody LePage

American Sex TapeTM by Jameka Williams

A Mysterious Life and Calling

Preacher, teacher, and postmistress, Charlotte Levy Riley was born into slavery but became a popular evangelist after emancipation

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A MYSTERIOUS LIFE AND CALLING
From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina  

Reverend Mrs. Charlotte S. Riley
Edited with an introduction by Crystal J. Lucky; Foreword by Joycelyn K. Moody

University of Wisconsin Press   January 2016

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    Professor Crystal J. Lucky

Crystal Lucky lived up to her name when she found a forgotten autobiography of a former slave in the library archives at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Lucky, an associate professor of English and the director of the Africana Studies Program at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is also an ordained elder, church official, and pastor’s wife. So, she was thrilled and astonished to discover the unknown memoir of an African American woman who was a licensed minister and popular preacher in the Carolinas after emancipation from slavery.

Reverend Mrs. Charlotte Levy Riley had called her book, “A Mysterious Life and Calling.” As Lucky began to read it, she knew that she had found something—and someone—extraordinary. Lucky has now published Riley’s memoir with the University of Wisconsin Press, providing an introduction and notes on events, society, and religious practice in the periods before, during, and after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and placing Riley’s story in the context of other spiritual autobiographies and slave narratives.

“[Crystal] Lucky has truly uncovered a gem with this autobiography of Charlotte S. Riley, a former slave who became a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal church after emancipation. . . . An important, informative achievement.”—Publishers Weekly

Born into slavery in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, young Charlotte Levy was taught to read, write, and sew despite laws forbidding black literacy. Raised a Presbyterian, she wrote of her conversion at age fourteen to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, embracing its ecstatic worship and led by her own spiritual visions.

Riley’s memoir is a revelation on many counts, including life in urban Charleston before and after emancipation, her work as a preacher at multiracial revivals, the rise of African American civil servants in the Reconstruction era, and her education and development as the only woman preacher in South Carolina. She was a licensed female minister in a patriarchal church, a feat rarely achieved at that time by women anywhere in the country, whether black or white. She also became a teacher of newly emancipated black people and their children, and postmistress of Lincolnville, an all-black incorporated town outside of Charleston where she owned a home and spent most of her adult life.

An astounding find! Riley’s autobiography shifts and revises what we thought we knew about black autobiography, antebellum autobiography, memoirs of spiritual awakening, narratives of slavery, and the history of South Carolina.” —Joycelyn Moody, University of Texas at San Antonio

Riley published her memoir privately in the early twentieth century, but as of yet Lucky has not discovered the year of its publication. “What is clear,” Lucky says, “is that the events span the nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth. Charlotte was born to enslaved parents, John and Sarah Levy, in Charleston on August 26, 1839.”

“As an enslaved girl in one of the busiest cities in the antebellum South, young Charlotte was spared some of the physical hardships of chattel slavery. She even received a modest education at a school run by a local widow, where she learned to read, write, sew, and do basic math. Her mother died when she was very young, so an uncle and a grandmother helped to raise her. Eventually, she began to live with and serve her grandmother’s white mistress, which closely aligned her with affluent, white Charlestonians. At the close of the Civil War, Charlotte married a free black architect, was shortly thereafter abandoned by her husband, began to worship and work with the A.M.E. Church, taught in a church-sponsored school, and received her local preacher’s license in 1871, just one year after African American men obtained the right to vote. She really is quite remarkable.”—Crystal Lucky

As the Reverend Charlotte S. Riley, the newly freed woman worked tirelessly to position African American men, women, and children to benefit economically, educationally, and spiritually from the vast changes that were happening throughout the United States as a result of Emancipation. She taught basic literacy skills and Bible classes to children and adults and traveled hundreds of miles to preach, despite debilitating health problems. In her travels, she also began to assist African American communities and mentor leaders in resisting the backlash of racial violence and the rise of Jim Crow laws. She took a role in organizing sharecroppers, assisting the newly formed Colored National Labor Union, and aiding the Honorable Robert Brown Elliott, the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard.

Although a memoir like Riley’s is quite rare, Lucky points out, “The power of narrative was important for women, whose physical presence was consistently scrutinized. Riley was aware of her tenuous public position; she repeatedly refers to herself in her autobiography as a ‘woman preacher’ rather than as a preacher or minister.” For some, her existence posed problems. “She faced skepticism from whites and blacks about whether a ‘real woman’ could be a preacher and, in turn, whether a preacher could really be a woman.”

A few accounts by nineteenth-century black preaching women in the northern states are known, but this is the first discovery of such a memoir written in the American South. Herman Beaver, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, notes, “This edition will be in people’s hands for a very long time. A Mysterious Life and Calling is a valuable primary source that can be referenced and studied in so many literary and cultural contexts.”

A Mysterious Life and Calling: From Slavery to Ministry in South Carolina by the Reverend Charlotte S. Riley will be published in January 2016 by the University of Wisconsin Press and can be ordered from local and online booksellers, or requested from libraries. Publicity contact: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu