Blacks in Race Defense

Blacks in Race Defense: Killers and Cutthroats in poetry highlights particular Black people who fought physically against the White enemies who sought to either enslave African and African descended people and in the modern era Blacks who physically fought to halt historical and contemporary police killings of Black people. In poetry and brief essays this subject matter is grounded in reference works for further reading, yet creatively rendered providing poetic narratives reflecting and presenting the lives of each person. In poetry, we discover the inner world of each warrior, male and female, and how their particular time period shaped how they thought, how they lived and why they took up arms against state sponsored killers. Mapping each person, each brave warrior in the culture of African and African American people, we get to sample not only a historical understanding of how courage emerges, but also spiritual, energetic elements that are germane to the philosophy and belief systems of Black people. Africans from the ancient of times to today think in terms of the past, present, and future entangled in their moment to moment existence on Earth. The poetic narratives in Blacks in Race Defense: Killers and Cutthroats honors those elements in metaphor and similes haunting, heroic and always already present.