welcome to the ecosystem!
Posts
📚 Pusher’s Delight This Week 📚 (copy 01)

📚 Pusher’s Delight This Week 📚 (copy 01)

📚 Pusher’s Delight This Week

July 18, 2023 • Est Reading Time: 2 minutes

7/18/23

Hey Good Humans!

We’re back with another week of bookish things, and other happenings around our way. So let’s talk about this week and next at BLK + BRWN.!

Indie Author Spotlight:

Last week we spoke with author of The Enchanted Garden Affirmation Coloring Book, Mercedes Osakwe. Her interview will be dropping at the end of this month on our podcast, Allegory.

The coloring book is availabe in-store and online.

Buy a Copy

Indie Poet + Author Spotlight:

Earlier last month we hosted a poet talk + book signing with Shundilyn Smith, of Poetically Alive.

We will be celebrating and featuring her poetry collection for a limited time including all four of her books — Letters to You, A Peace of Me, Things Left Unsaid, and Their White Truths My Black Truth.

Every purchase of her book from our store contributes to our efforts to directly support the author and also helps support our programming.

Shop the Collection

This week I’m keeping it local and reading Kansas City’s Montgall Avenue by Margie Carr. This century-old history of one city block whose residents shaped the changing status of Black people in Kansas City and built the social and economic institutions that supported the city's Black community— including: Chester Franklin, founder of our city’s Black newspaper, The Call; Lucile Bluford, KU alumna and served The Call for 69 years; Dr. John Edward Perry, founder of Wheatley-Provident Hospital, Kansas City's first hospital for Black people; and The principal and four teachers from Lincoln High School, Kanas City's only high school for African American students, also lived on the block.

The state of Missouri enforced segregation statues until the 1960s and the federal government created housing policies that erased any assets Black homeowners accumulated, robbing them of their ability to transfer that wealth to the next generation. The city's white leadership had little interest in supporting the Black community and instead used its resources to separate and isolate them.

Today, the 2400 block of Montgall Avenue is situated in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kansas City. And not by accident… More

Last week, I finished, When Crack Was King by Donovan X. Ramsey. I really enjoyed following the storylines of our four characters — and how deeply impactful and devastation that followed the Crack epidemic. It’s frustrating that this crisis is still so underestimated and has never received the same attention the Opioid crisis received. Not coincidentally. Ramsey’s journalist background shines as he weaves the kaleidoscopic web of what happened the last 40 years, from crack-addicted sex workers to drug dealers to government and political “reform” policies to those who were raised by those struggling with their addictions. This was frustrating, sobering, and extremely well written.

Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. More