The (Peeps) Rapsheet

last updated September, 1999
"If you don't understand me, it's your fault." -- Earth Wind and Fire The Rapsheet is basically a canonical list of folks I believe are worth listening to.
K. Anthony Appiah
Author of "In My Father's House"  and The Political Morality of Race
 
Regina Austin
Visiting Professor of Law
B.A., University of Rochester; J.D., University of Pennsylvania School of Law
Teaches Torts & Cultural Conflicts and Environmental Justice. William A. Schnader Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania School of Law; Member of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law faculty since 1977. Associate, Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis, 1974-1977.
 
John H. Bracey Jr.
Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality?
with August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, eds.
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971)

The Black Sociologists: The First Half Century
with August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, eds.
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971)

Black Nationalism in America
with August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, eds.
(Indianapolis; New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970)
 
Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham
Professor Higginbotham is the author of Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Harvard University Press,
1993), which has won book prizes from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Association for Research on Non-Profit and Voluntary Organizations. Her articles on African-American women's history cover such diverse themes as constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, religion, and the intersection of theory and history. Her article, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs (Winter 1992) won the Best Article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993. She is currently completing a book on African-American women and citizenship.
Margaret A. Burnham
LL.B., Lecturer in Political Science. Ms. Burnham’s interests are in the area of constitutional theory and
rights, comparative constitutional law, international human rights, and American legal history with a focus on
the law of slavery and race and law. Her current writing considers the role of the judiciary in democratization
in South Africa. She teaches courses on the U.S. Supreme Court, human rights, and gender, race and law. A
former trial judge, Ms. Burnham maintains a civil rights and constitutional law practice.
 
Geoffrey Canada
A call to assist boys in their treacherous journey to adulthood rings briefly with truth. Canada (Fist Stick Knife Gun, 1995) obviously
knows what he is talking about when it comes to young men in the inner city. Raised in the South Bronx, he is now president of the
Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, an organization employing and guiding urban kids, and ``father'' to four boys he thinks of as
sons beyond his own son and stepson. But in this slender volume of home truths, he seems to squander the opportunity to really enlighten
readers with his specific experience, opting instead for therapeutic homilies on often familiar themes. In chapters illustrating topics like
``Self-Worth,'' ``Sex,'' and ``Work,'' Canada compares parable-like stories of his own adolescence, suffused with hindsight, with
vignettes in the lives of the boys he now helps. In their affectionately deadpan style, they almost become Bill Cosbyesque riffs on the
foibles of adolescent boys and their bemused but sage dads. Except, of course, that too many of today's boys don't have the fathers
around to be bemused or sage--a moral tacked on in pleas for adult participation in boys' lives, briefly formulated as what ``we as a
society must do.'' None of his exhortations is by any means wrong, but given the forces of social fragmentation that have denuded these
boys' lives to begin with, the questions of how in the world ``what must be done'' can be, and who the ``we'' to do it really will be, dwarf
Canada's earnestness. The Rheedlen programs, to which he occasionally refers, seem to be an interesting example of some ``we'' in
action, but we only get a passing glimpse. Useful, at most, as a very basic primer in the reality lived by today's boys; that such an
elementary consciousness-raising may be needed, Canada can't be faulted for. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates,
 
Stephen L. Carter
Stephen L. Carter is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982.
 
Ellis Cose
Ellis Cose is an award winning American journalist and author of The Press, A Nation of Strangers, and most recently, The Rage of a Privileged Class.
 
Matthew Countryman
 
Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch is an actor, playwright, poet, essayist and jazz critic par excellence. He has written for The Village Voice, The Soho Weekly News, Harper's, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News and many other publications. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and has serve as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987. Premature Autopsies is one of his many interesting works.
 
Robert L. Johnson
Robert L. Johnson is founder and president of Black Entertainment Television (BET), the nation's first and only black owned cable network. Prior to founding BET, Mr. Johnson served as vice president of government relations for the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), a trade association representing more than 15,000 cable television companies. Before joining the NCTA, Mr. Johnson was press secretary for the Honorable Walter E. Fauntry, congressional delegate from the District of Columbia.

Mr. Johnson is a graduate of the University of Illinois and holds a master's degree in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Mr. Johnson serves on the boards of the Liberty Media Corporation, Hilton Hotels Coporation, the National Cable Television Association's Academy of Cable Programming, American Film Institute, Federal City Council, and The Advertising Council.
 
Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Selwyn R. Cudjoe is a Professor of Africana Studies and, from 1995 to 1999, the fourth Marion Butler McLean Chair in the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He teaches courses on the African American Literary Tradition, African Literature, Black WomenWriters, and Caribbean literature. His most recent course is entitled "Blackness in the American Literary Imagination."
 
Walter Davis
Southern Empowerment Project Southern Empowerment Project, 343 Ellis Avenue, Maryville, Tennessee 37804 {souempower@igc.apc.org}, celebrating ten years of homegrown training in community organizing and fundraising in the South and Appalachia. Southern Empowerment Project Ten years of Home Grown Organizing Training 423/984-6500 Fax 423/984-9916 souempower@igc.apc.org
 
Michael Dyson
 
Eric Foner
 
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates is W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities at Harvard University. He has served on the committees and boards of directors of many professional organizations, among them the Council on Foreign Relations, The African Roundtable, the Afro-American Academy, and the Schomberg Commission for the Preservation of Black Culture. He has received honorary degreees form several univerities, including Dartmouth College and hte University of West Virginia. His numerous writings have appeard in leading scholarly journals and he has been the editor of several volumes of works by other black writers. His books include Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self, and The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, which won the American Book Award in 1989. He is currently engaged in a project with K. Anthony Appiah at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute to create Encyclopaedia Africana.
 
Eugene D. Genovese
Historian specializing in American Slavery and the History of the South
 
Farah Griffin
 
Denise Herd
at Berkeley.
 
Elizabeth Higginbotham
of the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis.
Greg Hodge
 
Keith Jennings
Black Political Agenda
James Jennings
(whom Rivers mentions),
Willard Johnson
 
Robin Kelly
 
Randall Kennedy
Publisher of Reconstruction Magazine. Harvard Law Professor.
Glenn C. Loury
Glenn C. Loury is Professor of Economics at Boston University and has been and advisor and consultant with state and federal government agencies and private business organizations. His essays and commentaries have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Public Interest, Commentary, The New Republic and many other publications.

Some Works Include

Clarence Lusane,
Black Political Agenda
Charles Ogletree
 
Orlando Patterson
 
Adrian Piper
Adrian Piper,a professor of philosophy at Wellesly College, is completing a study of Kant. Her art has been exhibited at such institutions as The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, and the Hirschorn Museum; a retrospective of her work that began at England's Ikon Gallery is currently traveling through Europe.

Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, , James Jennings, Hubert Jones, James Blackwell, , Theresa Perry, Marilyn Richardson, , Michael Thelwell, Constance Williams, Stephen Carter, Charles Ogletree.

John Powell
 
Carl Taylor
 
Adolph Reed
 
Eugene Rivers
important community work with Boston-area black ministers.
 
Stacey Shears
 
A. Sivanandan
A. Sivanandan is director of the Institute of Race Relations in London, editor of the journal Race and Class and author of A Different Hunger and Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism
James Steele,
Black Political Agenda
Leon Sullivan
 
Lisa Sullivan
Black Political Agenda
Michael Thellwell
 
Makani Themba
of the Marin Institute and public health scholar On drug and alcohol policy.
Cornel West
My favorite, but losing ground to Gerald Early